
ClasIIL o4-Q 
Book H'S'S&F, 

Copyright N°_ 

COPBUGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE FLAME 
THAT IS FRANCE 



This book, under its French title, La 
Flamme au Poing, was awarded the Gon- 
court Prize in Paris for the year 1917. 



THE FLAME 
THAT IS FRANCE 

BY 

HENRY MALHERBE 



TRANSLATED BY V? W. B. 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1918 






-? 



Copyright, 1918, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, August, 1918 



SEP -5 1918 

©WAS 01 698 

| 



TO MY VERY DEAR 
RENE DELANGE 

WHOSE LIFE HAS BEEN FOR ME 
A LONG ACT OF FRIENDSHIP 



CONTENTS 

THREE DIALOGUES 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Memory 10 

II Love 17 

III Death 29 





MEMORY 




IV 


Portraits and Images 


. . 45 


V 


The Burning Gaze . 


. . 48 


VI 


The Lazar-House 


. 59 


VII 


Moments of Storm . 


. . 67 


VIII 


A Bombardment . 


. . 81 


IX 


The Hounds of Steel . 


. 87 



LOVE 

X Our Friend Music .... 97 

XI Transparent Souls .... 107 

XII In the Ruins of the Abbey . 110 

XIII At Daybreak 116 

XIV Gleams in the Shadow . . . 121 





CONTENTS 






DEATH 




CHAPTER 




PAGE 


XV 


Flashes op the Sword 


. . 129 


XVI 


A Me use Nocturne . 


. . 141 


XVII 


The Skeleton Before 


THE 




Trench 


. . 149 


XVIII 


A Descent Into Hell . 


. . 156 


XIX 


The Slave of Minos . 


. . 171 



THREE DIALOGUES 



THE FLAME THAT 
IS FRANCE 

THREE DIALOGUES 

IT is now fifty-five days since we took up 
our position in this shattered wood, 
stripped bare by steel and flame. The vio- 
lence of the battle, far from abating, grows 
ever fiercer and more desperate. Our sensi- 
bilities, racked by the horror and distress of 
it, fretted by enthusiasm and hatred, have 
gone mad, reined in as they are, trembling, 
rebellious. 

They have often spoken of relieving us. 

Colonel D has to hold us back. He 

knows our rage of destruction, the vehem- 
ence of our instinct of self-defense, of re- 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

venge. . . . And our commandant, Major 

H , unceasingly holds out hope to us, 

drives away the bitterness that invades us. 
But those that remain have haggard faces, 
scorched, pitiful to look upon. Fatigue 
makes them feverish and dry. They are the 
irreducible slaves of a tragic cause, of which 
they obscurely feel the urgency and the 
grandeur. 

It is a strange landscape that lies before 
us, scarred and mounded. The little valley 
where we are has an indescribable air of 
something worn-out, artificial, unreal. A 
battlefield of today ! It suggests a labora- 
tory that is occupied by some ferocious and 
sinister kind of scientists and encumbered 
with chemical apparatus and thunderous 
machines. . . . Pharmaceutical odors hang 
about the amputated trees, creep over the 
soil which the fiery hail has blackened. Dur- 
ing the whole afternoon the enemy has been 
sending us tear-shells that burst with a sound 
4 



THREE DIALOGUES 

like clattering tinware, spreading out their 
veils of mephitic mist, discharging their 
sharp, insinuating odors of mustard, sandal- 
wood, and incense. 

Another evening has arrived, clad in a mist 
mottled with countless spots of light, each 
accompanied by a deafening explosion. It is 
my turn to stand guard, this night through, 
at headquarters. A few rays, thin and blu- 
ish like swords, pass between the roughly 
joined planks of the door of my shelter. 

One grows accustomed to these feverish, 
lonely vigils. Even by day we rarely speak 
to one another. Amid these turbulent 
throngs we at the same time dread being 
separated and keep to ourselves. And the 
love of life and friendship persists so 
strongly in the burning solitude that we 
come to endow all things with existence, the 
disconsolate and mutilated trees, the roads 
that mount up and lose themselves in the cra- 
ters, the lacerated earth, our own over- 
5 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

heated weapons and the guns that growl and 
go through the same movements over and 
over, like black howling dervishes. How 
many times I have caught our men with 
grave tenderness addressing their rifles, their 
bayonets, their helmets, their cannon, the 
smooth, heavy shells which they were about 
to send off ! 

Captain A and Lieutenant L 

just now proposed to relieve me of my 

watch. I refused to go. L insisted, 

very affectionately : 

" You must think of yourself. You are 
very tired." 

It is true, — I feel faint. I light a candle 
that shrivels as if in a fury to consume it- 
self. . . . There comes a mysterious breath, 
the door trembles, I feel the presence of some- 
one. . . . 

Three beings had come to make me a visit. 
They seemed very tall ; nevertheless, they 
found room in this low, narrow shelter. I 
6 
4 



THREE DIALOGUES 

felt, I divined these presences rather than 
actually distinguished them. 

How can I repeat to you the sweet, pro- 
found colloquies that have passed between 
us? Here we are accustomed only to a lan- 
guage that is harsh and abrupt. The mem- 
ory of grave and musical words, of expres- 
sions that are true and fine, deserts me. My 
heart is hardened. I cannot describe these 
apparitions, diaphanous yet actual, incor- 
poreal yet visible, diffused yet possessing the 
breath of life. I can do no more than faith- 
fully transcribe their discourse, made up of 
music, of mystery, of perfume and of magic. 

But since the beginning of the war we have 
rubbed shoulders with so many strange men 
that this encounter has not surprised me. 

Is it my weariness that has raised these 
beings up before me, these beings which have 
the fire and the color of life, — of something 
other, something greater than life? 

For a long time now we have been placed 
7 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

upon those frontiers of humanity from which 
it is only a step to the other side. There 
everything is stripped bare. Ideas, reduced 
and broken up, retain a crude, blinding light, 
an indescribable brilliance like that of a crys- 
tal inflamed by the setting sun. 

In all truth, I have little taste for conver- 
sations with symbolic personages. It suits 
me better to talk with almost any poor man, 
however miserable, to decipher an actual face 
that life has humbled, that passion has worn 
and suffering scarred. 

But memory, love and death have addressed 
me with voices of entreaty, lowly and appeal- 
ing. Their little philosophy struck me as 
rather commonplace, rather easy-going, and 
their heroism as slightly conventional. By 
an artifice for which my readers might be 
grateful I could have named them Rene, 
Helene and Francoise. But I prefer to be 
more candid. Besides, I think the truth is 
more commanding and more accessible in the 
8 



THREE DIALOGUES 

form of an idea than of a personage. . . . 

In this collapse of all living things, in this 
besetting lust of destruction to which all who 
surround us seem to be consecrated, we nat- 
urally endow with less vital force the organ- 
ism that is so swiftly shattered than the 
thought which endures. 

What need have I to ask excuses? Mem- 
ory, love and death have come, this night, to 
me. I have seen them, I tell you, in a dis- 
turbing incarnation. And as we no longer 
fear anything and no one can astonish us for 
long, I have talked with them as with new 
comrades of the battlefield. Well I knew, 
when I refused to quit my post, that some- 
thing singular and extraordinary was going 
to happen to me, that the very depths of my 
soul were to be stirred, that I was to find my- 
self face to face, in this night of solitude, 
with the unknown beings that rule over my 
destiny. 



MEMORY 

HE is a tall young man very like my 
brother and a certain friend. His 
features are irregular and sad, his hair light. 
His look reminds me of my mother's, whose 
eyes are so sorrowful. His gracious, airy 
presence blends with the half-obscurity of a 
corner of the shelter. He speaks in a pene- 
trating voice, his blue lips trembling. 

" I have come to you tonight because, in 
the hardships of your present life, you forget 
those who are dearest to you. You have 
spread out on your knees the pictures of 
those you love and for all the strength of 
your heart you cannot evoke them distinctly. 
In the presence of death, we forget those 
who help us to live." 

" You are mistaken. They are always in 
my memory." 

10 



MEMORY 

" You believe that, in response to your 
eager longings, they come to you as they 
really are? They are better or worse than 
you imagine. Permit me to free them from 
the tarnish that has gathered over them ; let 
me give these darkened images a few touches 
of fresh color, a few lines to strengthen the 
blurred silhouettes. . . . You see, they are 
enveloped in the mist of absence. For a few 
moments, you can live once more in their 
presence." 

" But are they possessed by the same nos- 
talgia? Do they think of us with the same 
love?" 

" If you could see their reddened eyes. . . . 
When you go, we do not know how much you 
mean to us. . . . We never quite grow used 
to your disappearance. . . . Your sorrows 
are ours ; by some strange magnetism, they 
reach even us. And you have the delirium 
of action that is lacking to us." 

" Do you desire so much, then, to have us 
11 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

back among you? Are you not a little afraid 
to meet us again with everything that is vio- 
lent in us exposed, our passions out of hand? 
Have not our places been taken? Equilib- 
rium is already restored. We shall disturb 
it perhaps. Ah, notoriously ambiguous are 
the emotions which our sacrifices, our losses 
provoke. . . ." 

" Be still ; do not blaspheme. You do not 
hear the prayers of your people, their cries 
of distress. Think of those who have not 
been able to endure the ordeal and whose 
hearts have broken with anguish, think of 
those who no longer believe in humanity, who 
no longer wish to see anything and anticipate 
nothing ! " 

"But the rest? We have abandoned 
everything we own, everything we enjoy, at 
the crossroads of the world. All who pass by 
will not respect these things. It is in their 
hands to forget us and undo us. Our per- 
sonalities have been torn apart. How can 
12 



MEMORY 

we find ourselves again in this cataclysm? 
We are the soil itself in movement, numerous, 
plentiful as the trees of the forest beaten by 
the storm. We are no more to be distin- 
guished than the tangled branches of the 
thicket, of the bush, of the jungle." 

" I am less sorry for you than for your 
mothers, your children, your friends. They 
were united about your soul as about a lamp. 
It was your air they breathed and your activ- 
ity nourished them. They cannot fill the 
void that you have left in them. It is a 
corner deep in shadow against which they 
forever fling themselves as against a wall that 
shuts off the horizon and confounds their 
eyes." 

" That does not prevent them from resum- 
ing the fragrant course of their existence, 
welcoming its joys, opening themselves to the 
sweetness and harmony of life." 

" But you, you have a share in this mag- 
nificent adventure. You intoxicate yourself 
13 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

with the unrivalled glory of it. Ah ! these 
glorious armies made up of such multifari- 
ous peoples, such variegated colors ! You 
knead the dough from which the new world 
will arise. And they remain in their narrow 
paths whither nothing reaches them but the 
muffled echo of your noble enterprises. For 
two whole years you have dwelt in the open 
air, in communion with the earth which you 
defend." 

" Oh, my poor little blue room, my books 
so full of melancholy and friendship, my little 
terrace facing the misty garden. . . ." 

" You inhabit a reality so intense that you 
forget the splendor of these fruitful and de- 
structive deeds of yours." 

" Who will realize the grandeur of our sac- 
rifice, the bitterness that overtakes us after 
fierce engagements, our religion of duty? " 

" I draw flattering portraits of you." 

" When we no longer exist, who will tell 
14 



MEMORY 

them of the beauty that has died with us ? " 
" They have seen you in your youth and 
strength. They will always see you so. 
Those bright and happy images will never 
leave their eyes. What man would not wish 
at his death to leave behind such memories? 
They will never be able to convince them- 
selves that you will not return again. They 
will start up at every sound of a key in the 
lock, at every footfall on the path. You 
will not die in their hearts. The fire that 
gives you life will be tended. It will spring 
up in the air they breathe and the place that 
knows them. Do not think that only the 
malingerers, the cowards, the aged, and 
those who have special protection are going 
to survive the war. You will live again in 
all those you have left, and the beauty that 
consumes you will find its way even into those 
who do not seem to you worthy. Have confi- 



15 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" Let them ever bear in mind, then, that 
we shall be watching them, judging them, 
holding them responsible." 

There is a sudden crash, a crepitation. I 
brush by my visitors and dash out. A maga- 
zine of many-colored rockets has exploded at 
our left. They shoot through the sombre air 
with their soft, luminous curves like glitter- 
ing birds of the Antilles. Their sparkling, 
gayly radiant plumes are scattered hither 
and thither and extinguished like satisfied 
desires. Opposite, far away, the gleams of 
a great fire besplash with gold the nocturnal 
sky. The detonations grow less frequent and 
seem less violent. A fresh and gentle fra- 
grance like that of the hawthorn steals forth, 
as if in compassion, brushes through the mist 
and the chemical odors and brings me, in this 
evil abode of tragedy and weariness, a glad, 
enchanting surprise. 



16 



II 



LOVE 

1 RETURN to headquarters. A mysteri- 
ous tranquillity takes hold of me, re- 
stores me. Our work is all ready for the 
morrow. I have nothing to do but to watch 
and await new orders. A sort of warmth 
spreads over my solitude. And I relapse 
once more into revery. 

I turn my head to one side. The slender 
young man is still there. I observe two 
women, one at his either hand. One of them 
detaches herself from the mysterious group. 
She seems to come toward me. She envelops 
me with her heady, impalpable presence. 

How exquisite she is in her shadowy frock 
of the latest mode ! Her flushed, boyish face 
agitates me just like those I have loved. She 
17 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

sighs, unconstrained but blushing a little, not 
knowing how to begin our conversation. 
Taking pity on her confusion, I say to her: 

" To everything that is worth the price of 
suffering, to everything for which we strug- 
gle and die, we give a woman's face. You 
are the dream that mounts up in us, bitter 
and abrupt. Our ardor, our temerity, our 
headstrong sacrifice are impassioned evi- 
dences of love and of our endeavor to win 
your tenderness, your recognition, your 
pride. Ah, you know well enough what it is 
we fear, that you will not in all waj's prove 
worthy of our renunciation. Our sufferings 
you yourselves must merit." 

" Do you not feel that we are behind you, 
like the long glances of love? A corner of 
our hearts, the best, the purest, is kept for 
you." 

" Oh, jealousy has no place in our 
thoughts. That is a mean and petty senti- 
ment which has no place in this war." 
18 



LOVE 

" We cannot have the perfection of your 
austerity. Since you are inclined to medita- 
tion this evening, I shall try to descend into 
the depths and bring to the light the motives 
and reactions of the feminine soul as it is. 
As for you, you have gone back to the earth, 
to the stark life of instinct, purified of all 
alloy of artificiality, to the ingenuousness of 
the animal. That simplicity has communi- 
cated itself to us and taken all the stronger 
hold upon us because we are closer to nature. 
For death ravages our work which was al- 
ready sad enough. The war unpeoples this 
planet which we have been charged with the 
task of enriching with men. Today a som- 
bre and breathless ardor to recreate pos- 
sesses us. We must replace those who have 
vanished. I have none too many workwomen 
to fill up the void. It is in this way you 
ought to interpret the excesses, the license of 
these captives who remain without masters, 
intoxicated with their transitory freedom. 
19 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Do not condemn them without a hearing. 
Their submission to the rigorous and im- 
penetrable commands of the world provokes 
these impulses that seem to you delinquen- 
cies." 

" Ah J What weighty excuses ! And from 
you, the last one to make them ! Are we to 
think then, that will, dignity of feeling, the 
conquest of insolent instincts are to be for- 
ever alien to the abodes of free women? " 

" Why these ill-natured words ? Have 
you, too, then, had to bear the news of a 
mistress's inconstancy? " 

"Perhaps. . . ." 

" Do not be indignant. It is certain she 
is in tears now. Often she finds your image 
before her eyes. She bewails her ruined love, 
her squandered destiny and that thirst to 
create which she can never quench. Again 
she says to herself : 6 He is the best and 
greatest of men.' Another, sly and rough, 
has come prowling about her. Faced with 
20 



LOVE 

the innumerable deaths of this war, she who 
was made to give life has felt the passion to 
bring forth supplanting duty and memory." 

" Do not continue this specious discourse. 
Know, however they may fail, that we remain 
unblemished and strong. No longer can the 
triumphant mechanism of our muscles suffer 
impairment under these calamities. We 
brave the heaviest storms." 

" Meanwhile, the greater number of them 
soberly keep faith with you. We tremble 
unceasingly, knowing that you are in peril. 
You are the cause of a sombre and perpetual 
fear that holds us in imperishable bonds. 
And you fill us with pride in the very hour 
of our distress." 

" Go, leave us to our inflexible destiny, our 
solitary passion. We are caught up in a 
love that is more lasting, more sincere. We 
give ourselves to liberate the nations, those 
splendid prisoners, the oppressed peoples, for 
noble ways and generous ideas. . . ." 
21 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" Yes, with us you might grow weak and 
waste yourselves. Instead, you leave us, 
with our desires unappeased. . . . You 
bring us also the sorrow, the destruction 
that is yours. To love, is it not to run to 
meet death, is it not to perish? " 

" It is also to live again." 

" Egoists, — you are that, all of you, at 
the Front ! — you never think of your lost 
wives, your deluded fiancees. If you are 
killed, how shall they heal their irresolute 
and forever wounded souls? Thrown to the 
earth, prostrate at the crossroads, how, with- 
out stability and without a guide, shall they 
again take up their rugged paths? " 

" Ah, but you just now told me that their 
creative frenzy dominated this anguish and 
drove away despair." 

" But we are not all like that. It is true 
of those who lack conscience and the sense of 
shame. . . ." 

"The majority. . . ." 
22 



LOVE 

" No ! Our menacing instincts are dis- 
armed. They are lost in scruple and in dis- 
cipline. They change themselves into senti- 
ment and thought." 

" Did you not say that you were too weak 
to resist the winning commands of nature? " 

" Possibly, when we interpret them in our 
own way. . . . The rest of us cannot so 
swiftly trample our moral beliefs and our 
habits under foot. Come, of us two, I, I am 
the more faithful, the more easily intimi- 
dated. . . ." 

" Indeed? How easy to charge others 
with the ill-deeds with which you are re- 
proached ! " 

" Reflect and you will understand. We 
used to have your tender protection. We 
reposed in your love. We travelled, hand 
in hand, the difficult roads of the world. 
Existence no longer frightened us and the 
future we regarded with glad eyes. We were 
accustomed to your faults, your rough- 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

nesses, and you cherished our capricious- 
ness. We took pride in your courage and 
your intelligence and you found us exquis- 
ite. . . ." 

" What are you leading up to ? " 

" And then our love is broken apart ! Do 
you imagine we can form new ties so soon? 
It takes so long, it is so complicated, so pain- 
ful to learn to know, to admit another man." 

" A good many are not greatly troubled 
by that. . . ." 

" Strange creature, a man ! And a woman 
also. To meet an unknown being, the secrets 
of whose heredity have not yet been revealed, 
to begin again, before one's wound has been 
able to heal, the winning artifices, the little 
deceits of love — that is beyond my strength, 
I think. No longer can I accept that irk- 
some task, those labors without hope. . . . 
Besides, what assurance will a second choice 
bring to one whom a hero has loved and who 
has betrayed him in his absence? How can 
24 



LOVE 

one hazard that new experiment in passion, 
how feel anything but shame in those clan- 
destine intimacies, how escape the torment- 
ing recollections that are certain to rise up 
at every turn ? " 

" I assure you that one begins those things 
unconsciously and quite casually gets oneself 
committed. . . ." 

" I shall not listen to your insinuations. 
You have said that we must deserve your 
sufferings ; I reply that you ought to marvel 
at our renunciations. For our mission, our 
very nobility constrains us to a creation that 
nothing can interrupt. We are obliged to 
repair the evil you commit. And yet how 
many there are who exile themselves forever 
from these vital joys and fiy, with your in- 
animate memory, from the sweet fulfillment of 
their fertile destiny ! " 

" And we? We shall have known scarcely 
the first tremors of the joy of earth. We 
shall hardly have inhaled the fragrance of a 
25 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

single spray in the limitless gardens. I still 
sense the perfumes of the city. . . . No, to- 
day your beauty no longer moves me; it is 
lost and unavailing like an inaccessible 
oasis." 

" Some day you will find us again." 

" Perhaps. . . . But the long absence 
alters us and absolves you." 

" I can promise you the contrary ! Your 
fiery outlines, cut, loftier and more beautiful 
every day, against the tumult of battle, as- 
tonish and oppress us." 

" If I were sure of always keeping you, I 
should kneel and weep for the joy of it. But 
my heart congeals and grows dry to think 
how far away you are, at the mercy of un- 
worthy suitors. And I check the tender 
songs, the warm words that rise to my tight- 
ened lips. . . ." 

" Your present life makes you unjust and 
hard. A few among you, I hope, will under- 
stand and have pity. ... Of all the rest I 
26 



LOVE 

implore a little less distrust, a little more 
respect. Tonight, I see, I shall not reach 
your heart. I shall say no more and set 
forth again. . . ." 

I wanted to speak further with her, to 
speak more sj^mpathetically, to do penance 
for my distress. . . . 

My shelter seems darker than before. She 
is no longer there. . . . That soft rumor, is 
it the rustling of dead leaves or the whisper 
of the radiant silk that envelops her brush- 
ing against the trees in her flight? . . . 
Those sad sounds, puzzling, prolonged, do 
they come from the moaning wind or from 
that sorrow which grows dim and fades 
away? ... I have opened my door upon 
the night, and I seek again the beloved way- 
farer whom I have not held back and who 
has not remained with me. 

An explosion has just resounded close by. 
The concussion makes me stagger. An en- 
emy shell has burst over a piece in our first 

n 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

battery. There are four wounded and two 
dead. 

Angrily and in bitter haste we bear away 
the mutilated men and cover with tent-cloths 
the remains of those who have been killed. 
The diffused light of a lantern falls on the 
decapitated body of an under-officer. Be- 
tween his shoulders we still see the sticky 
orifice, seething and red. . . . Ah! Throw 
quickly over this corpse the cloth your trem- 
bling hands hold. 



28 



Ill 



DEATH 



THESE horrors of an atrocious war no 
longer paralyse - our energies. An 
hour afterward, these sanguinary visions 
lose their sharpness and with a keener deci- 
sion and the same fatalistic obstinacy we go 
on with the task already begun. 

I look at my watch ; it is three o'clock in 
the morning. I must stand guard until five. 
Those evocations of the past rush over me 
again, tinged with a sardonic melancholy. 
Memory, love ! And there is death astir 
behind these consoling and friendly phan- 
toms. . . . 

What ! Have they not finished torment- 
ing me with regrets, deceitful apparitions of 
my fancy that they are? In a shadowy cor- 
29 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

ner I become aware of another eddy, a 
strange breath, an invasive movement. . . . 

" Look at me. Have I an ill-favored 
form, grimacing, unsightly? Do I frighten 
you?" 

A young woman, wise, throbbing, exquisite, 
smiles like a pitying and watchful angel at 
my gaze. Her voice is fresh and musical 
like a spring that tumbles over white pebbles 
and cradles the tangled hair of the grasses. 

" Death, dark morning, victory of the 
shades, do you assume this radiant magi- 
cian's face to lure us, to astound us, to make 
us cross your threshold of quick-lime, stone, 
and shadow? " 

" I present myself to you under my fa- 
miliar aspect and clothed in serenity." 

" I did not imagine you so." 

" You are ignorant children, deluded and 

heedless. Do you not understand that you 

keep alive a dissonance in the music of this 

world? But I shall draw you out of that 

30 



DEATH 

abyss where you devour one another, where 
you track down the humble, ingenuous ani- 
mals and barbarously tear away their skins. 
... In my shining gardens I shall give you 
calm, order, harmony. . . . When I meet 
you in these caverns it is so easy for me to 
engulf you. Already, in your blue uniforms, 
you are fragments of the sky. Almost in- 
sensible is your passage into the atmos- 
phere." 

" Stay ! All the springs, all the summers 
that we still might live. . . ." 

" Do not give way to regret. You should 
thirst for other delights. Turn your head. 
Lift it. All the enchantments of which you 
dream, all the cherished thoughts are com- 
prehended in the terrible deed to which you 
are constrained today. Spare yourself the 
slow stages of a whole lifetime of suffering. 
Each of your efforts turns for its meaning 
to me. But in the struggle you keep up 
your transports have the harmonious force, 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

the passionate melody of eternal things. 
Your activity is so intense that it leads you, 
immediately, to me." 

" Oh, I have still so much to see and to 
love in this world! Destiny has placed me 
here, a sorry creature conscious of my ap- 
proaching doom, and I shall have passed by 
so many beauties I shall not have tasted, 
beauties I shall never have truly known but 
for which, in spite of all, I was born. Could 
I have torn myself from ignorance, filled my 
sluggish soul, so placid, so ephemeral, with 
the powers, the colors, the splendors my in- 
spired forefathers have lavished on this 
earthly domain. . . ." 

" Here you are like beggars in the squalor 
they love. I end your servitude. I open the 
gate of that narrow prison which your body 
is. Ah! crush the love of this misery to 
which you are all too accustomed. Hence- 
forth, your existence will be pure, free from 
the base sorrows of the flesh." 

m 



DEATH 

" No. Not yet. My eyes are made for 
dwelling on these perishable delights, my arms 
for clasping these pliant things to which life 
gives birth and which I cannot despise." 

" You must lift yourself to the absolute, 
to the sublime, where they are whom you be- 
lieve dead and who are not dead. They love 
you and they summon you already. They 
rise from their graves, they quit their crys- 
talline heights to survey your aspiring com- 
panies, and they shed tears of admiration." 

" I am not willing to vanish yet." 

" You will not vanish. When you have 
laid aside the grievous burden of your flesh, 
you will be transformed into impalpable 
graces, wandering and purified flames, the 
supreme and secret guardians of your com- 
rades and your friends. Those that have 
dwelt in France, in this favored corner of the 
earth, still float in its hallowed atmosphere. 
. . . The motherland? It is the garden 
where one has grown up among these watch- 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

ful souls, these phantom inspirers and pro- 
tectors. There, man becomes an aggregate 
of rare and ancient presences, a magnetic 
centre that attracts so many burning mem- 
ories, such splendors of the inner life, such 
invisible, vibrant forces, perpetually sus- 
pended in space, that call like ships at the 
obscure island of a living body and give it 
loyalty to the past, guidance for the future, 
and all the divine, intoxicating fragrance of 
the infinite ! " 

" Oh, how persuasive and consoling is your 
invitation to cross the gulf! What are you, 
then? An exquisite, deceitful sophist or the 
queen of truth? " 

" Sincerity, I tell you, the way that is 
pure and clear, naked rhythm, the beating 
wing of an eternal prayer ! As for you, you 
toil in the market-place of the blind, with- 
out perceiving the sages that smile at you, 
surprised and shy, at the corner of the enter- 
ing streets, — without drinking of the cool 
34 



DEATH 

waters of the spring. Call to your mind 
those words of the Gospel : 6 Ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free ! ' " 

" Your sermon is all very well. . . . But 
I should prefer not to be so quickly deliv- 
ered from existence. Its illusions are to me 
a precious boon." 

" From which you, in your turn, ought to 
liberate yourself. Let your action be adven- 
turous, heroic, and spontaneous. Realize 
how unique the occasion is. By a noble, re- 
ligious effort you can surmount these accum- 
ulating horrors, unite yourself with our 
plenitude, augment our ascending caravan. 
Fugitive shadow, why create for yourself a 
covetous, tyrannical personality, attached to 
the dust that is going to regain possession 
of you, instead of treading these ephemeral 
paths humbly, with bent head and clasped 
hands? You are not indispensable to the 
movement of the world, you are not essential 
35 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

to its activity; the clock of time will not 
be put out of order by your disappear- 
ance." 

" What matter if you do snatch us from 
these terrestrial shores toward which my 
heart still turns ! Only, in the bonds of our 
affection my friends and I have established a 
fragile and precious human harmony. You 
bring confusion into it by taking me away." 

" You substitute, then, for the grand equi- 
librium of the universe these petty, illusive 
economies? But even in the darkest souls 
the echo of the eternal rhythm rings ! Be 
not deceived ; when, in this war, you abandon 
your existence, the living will praise your 
generous effort less than your own deliver- 
ance, your swift arrival at the radiant city 
that is so far away. . . ." 

" You see, what offends and distresses me 

is the ugly, sanguinary martyrdom you have 

the power to inflict on my young body, so 

agile and vigorous, its decay in some ditch 

36 



DEATH 

unknown to those that might bedew it with 
their tears and their prayers." 

" Ah, shrewd, cautious soldier, that har- 
rowing pity for the beloved remains that de- 
cay in the earth does not so much disturb the 
minds of today. . . . Has not the disinte- 
gration that you fear already begun to take 
place in these burrows you have inhabited 
for two years? " 

" And so you are quite convinced that our 
burial will be for us only the continuation of 
our present way of living? " 

" This evil garment of flesh, these obscure 
indignities, why should they matter to you, 
after all? From the spot where it will be 
hidden may rise, perhaps, a beautiful leafy 
tree, a fragrant rosebush, more than a few 
swaying stems of nourishing grain. . . . 
You do not know my secret designs and for 
what an inexhaustible harmony you have been 
created and are going to die. ... Be brave. 
Be strong. Be noble." 
37 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" Since, this night, you feel pity for me, 
do not leave me in this agonizing ignorance. 
Tell me. . . ." 

With one white finger on her closed and 
smiling lips, the enigmatical young woman 
has already disappeared in a ray of the ris- 
ing sun. . . . 

And behold, a profound, sorrowful impulse 
urges me to follow that angel of despair. A 
serene desire for death and departure points 
my way to the supreme adventure. A som- 
bre longing for annihilation treads under foot 
my wishes of an hour ago. Yes, to go, even 
I, down there, to efface myself in the general 
mystery of things, to engulf myself in the 
dim tranquillity of the numberless dead, to 
tear myself from illusion, from discord, and 
from cruelty. . . . 

In a tremorous light, in some illusory 
scene beyond time and space, the beloved 
events of my past come to life again. . . . 
38 



DEATH 

In a luminous rapture I make my confession, 
murmuring: 

" I thank thee, my God, for having granted 
me, in these so few years, all the charms and 
all the sorrows of life. That I might the 
better appreciate its joys, you caused me to 
be born in wretchedness and obscurity. In 
your grace you elected me to hear your di- 
vine voice even in the violence of men. You 
permitted me to keep in my heart the full 
discourse of your religion while others in 
their old age lost their way and forgot you 
in this degrading dungeon of life. Your 
mercy toward me is infinite and I see a new 
proof of it in that you permit the axe of 
death to strike my brow while I am still 
young and have hardly begun to taste the 
mortification of decrepitude. 

" At first, you let me run wild like an ani- 
mal in the gardens of the earth, and that I 
might marvel at their verdant activity in the 
39 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

splendor you had permitted them, you tore 
away the veils that obscured my sight and I 
rejoiced like a child intoxicated with your 
holiness. 

" Later, you exalted so high, so brightly 
lighted up my poor heart of dust that it 
shone in space like your well-beloved stars 
and drank in the flowery prospects of the 
world. 

" Lord, you have made me wander in stir- 
ring countries, inspiring and splendid, and I 
have travelled round and round this globe as 
if it did not suffice me, as if the atmospheric 
current of other planets were drawing me 
even when I might have died in some dark 
corner, ignorant of your ineffable footprints. 

" What my eyes could not see you have let 
my heart find by offering me the disquieting 
spectacle of events that were humble in seem- 
ing but of infinite significance. 

" You have filled me with a vast and quick- 
ening love for my fellowmen, and since I had 
40 



DEATH 

no child of my own you have laid upon the 
bodies of these men a childlike feebleness, giv- 
ing me the power to sustain them like a father 
with all my youthful strength. 

" I have reason to be proud that you have 
averted wickedness from my path and that 
to spare me the bitterness of remorse you 
have thrown me into the grievous turmoil of 
the war. Lord, I bless your name for having 
looked down upon my weakness and for 
granting me death in such circumstances that 
I can believe it has befallen me as an atone- 
ment for the violent things I have done. 

" Lastly, you have let me spring up in the 
fullness of day, with all the freshness, the 
abundance, the bold suppleness of a jet of 
water that mounts toward your balconies, 
and behold, you add to your bounty the su- 
preme boon: you cut it short without caus- 
ing me pain, and I expire in the moment of 
taking flight toward your heavenly ter- 



41 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Already, how light it is ! 

Strange, unshapely insects, of some un- 
heard of species, throng my table, my papers, 
troops of them skipping happily about as 
the night grows pale. In the intervals be- 
tween explosions the placid, indifferent, un- 
concerned note of the cuckoo lifts itself, and 
the frail and chirping cry of the marsh war- 
bler. The day rises swiftly, furtively steal- 
ing in, like a pirate returned from a raiding 
expedition who tosses with full hands into 
my shadowy cavern his ingots of glittering 
gold. My watch is ended. 

I go forth to drink in the new morning. 
The chilly, velvety air presses my face. My 
reason, which has recovered its equilibrium, 
marvels and smiles at these nocturnal dia- 
logues. 

Verdun. May 26, 1916. 



MEMORY 



IV 



PORTRAITS AND IMAGES 

I SHOULD prefer not to afflict your eyes, 
already saddened by so many unmerited 
miseries, so many crushing atrocities, with 
any more pictures of suffering and cruelty. 
It is enough for me to have explored that 
abyss. I do not wish even to preserve the 
memory of it. I threw away my first note- 
book, because I believed that by some mag- 
netic force that revocation of tragic hours 
would call up others to my sight. . . . 

But, O my lost friends, my tortured broth- 
ers, can I in after years forget your dishon- 
ored features, the unknown sacrifices of your 
pathetic heroism? Shall I forget, even I, my 
own strange sensations and all these spec- 
tacles of a black and furious humanity? 
Too well I feel it ; I must keep watch, I must 
45 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

keep watch for myself over this collection 
of portraits and images of a reality so bitter 
and so poignant that it surpasses all the 
visions of nightmare and delirium. 

Only, I cannot and I will not transcribe 
these agonies with too great exactitude. 
They have all passed through a heart that is 
torn with pity and sadness, in a grey and 
trembling atmosphere. . . . And besides — 
I say it sincerely — I fear lest over-exact 
evocations will bring back again these days of 
death and ferocity. 

My heart, conduct me through this gulf, 
raise up, in your diffused, wavering light, this 
wreckage and these bones which my memory 
consecrates, purifies, loves. . . . 



I have always had a fearful conception of 

what life must be like under the sea where 

monsters are eternally at war, devouring one 

another. Just why I do not know, but I 

46 



PORTRAITS AND IMAGES 

feel as if I had been immersed, bewildered, in 
these oceans of murder. . . . And behold on 
the shore a humble and unskilful book. . . . 
When, O my God, shall I remount to the sur- 
face, to the light ? 

* * * 

I have gone over in detail everything that 
is to follow, a detail the intensity of which 
sickens me whenever I reread my notes. My 
already confused sensibility drooped or grew 
feverish over these brutal recitals. No 
longer will I listen to this maddening voice. 
I must recall these things calmly, transmut- 
ing the fever into a vibration that is pathetic, 
soothing, transparent. ... I shall suffer 
less from these dulled recollections. In this 
way I shall call up as tenderly as I can my 
beloved and sorrowful existence of today. I 
shall show myself neither stronger nor 
weaker than I am. Has not a great writer 
— who was it? — spoken of a "heroic mel- 
ancholy " ? 

47 



THE BURNING GAZE 

THE observation post which I command 
is very flimsy, built like a great eagle's 
nest, suspended among the trees, on the spur 
of a bluish hill. It affords views of the whole 
of our sector. It seems almost to slip over 
the edge of the promontory that descends to 
the estuary of the shaggy meadow. It ad- 
vances on the enemy like the prow of a ship, 
of which the flanks, stern, and rigging are 
still hidden in the mist. 

All the violent engagements that have 
taken place here have not consumed the 
beaut}^ of this landscape. 

Three devastated villages lie prone in the 
valley, behind our first lines. The crumbling 
old houses stare in sad astonishment at their 
48 



THE BURNING GAZE 

wounds reflected in the swiftly running wat- 
ers. A few red tiles still cling to the torn 
roofs of these ancient cottages that so 
suggest pathetic, mumbling, old paralyzed 
granddams, their hair bound in great ker- 
chiefs with red squares. The mournful, mis- 
shapen silhouettes of rickety and rusty 
ploughs, ox-carts, broken trucks stand out 
against the tumultuous horizon. And all 
these suppliant things speak to the heart, 
lamenting their sorrows, begging for pity or 
revenge. . . . The church alone, ecstatic, 
prayerful, careless of her wounds, lifts aloft 
the cracked and tottering belfry which has 
slid back, so to say, on her neck like an as- 
trologer's cap, catching every night on its 
dark point a resplendent star. 

I have scrutinized these landscapes of the 
Meuse so long that they have inlaid them- 
selves upon my sight in lines of fire. I still 
see them when I close my eyelids. Beautiful, 
pathetic fragment of the countryside that 
49 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

haunts my gaze, I carry you with me folded 
up in a corner of my memory. 



The personnel of the observation post com- 
prises infantrymen, artillerymen, and sap- 
pers. But they are no longer distinguish- 
able from one another. Their present work 
obliterates all differences. They are no 
longer anything but lookout-men. Their 
whole will is focussed in a gaze, the concen- 
trated clearness of which is directed, like a 
sword, like a fiery thrust, upon the enemy. 
The instinct of the chase has remounted from 
our ancestral depths. It has perfected it- 
self. It has acquired a feverish, a flashing 
acuteness. Everything gives place to the 
sharp desire to spy out the enemy. To this 
phosphorescent vision, this subtile sense of 
hearing, there is added a strange, fierce in- 
stinct that makes one scent the enemy, fore- 
see the place whither he is moving, bite one's 
50 



THE BURNING GAZE 

clenched hands that one cannot pursue him, 
spring at his throat and throw him in a re- 
lentless struggle of wild beasts. 

A branch that trembles, a wisp of smoke, 
a fresh tint of earth, of tracks in the mirj 
road, the swelling of a breastwork, a swift 
streak of flame, a tiny upper window where a 
shadow stirs, have for us an exact and pas- 
sionate significance. The cunning enemy 
hides in the ground and creeps along under 
cover of the high grass. But nothing that 
happens passes unperceived. We can see 
him move ten kilometers behind his lines. 
The telescope that throws its bright reflec- 
tions within the penumbra of the observatory 
accuses the distant and detested shadows. 
They stir in its field of view like bacilli and 
microbes across a microscope, veritable mal- 
ady as they are of the suffering earth. 

To anyone who surveys it for the first time, 
the panorama of this battlefield appears life- 
less, deserted, animated only by the turmoil 
51 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

of the shells that glide wailing through the 
air as if on a road of glass and at the point 
of impact toss aloft the spurting clay, like 
jets of black water. To us the scene is al- 
ways in rolling and convulsive motion. On 
these slopes, which seem empty and soli- 
tary, we discover the enemy everywhere, his 
squat, breathless motor-cars, his heavy horse- 
men, his hypocritical workmen, defilers and 
despoilers. The Teuton is in perpetual dis- 
cord with this precious landscape; it rejects 
him, betrays him, disclaims him, points him 
out as a sick man points out the abscess that 
consumes him. 



Colonel de M , who comes now and 

then to my observatory, had given me per- 
mission to unloose the fire of our batteries 
on certain important objectives which might 
suddenly come into my sight. Eight days 
ago, a long brown, sinuous mass crawled over 
52 



THE BURNING GAZE 

a certain narrow, white road, and moved 
back. I observed it through the glass, while 
on his side the man on watcli examined it. 
... A single cry, hollow and brief. I take 
^certain measurements on the map. Then, I 
fling through the telephone : 

" Aux coordonnees X — . . . Y — ... 
A troop of about two hundred men is de- 
scending on Ch . Fire ! I am watch- 

ing." 

A moment after, a hurricane of artillery 
beats down on the enemy reinforcements. 
. . . That evening, in the shelter of my 

friend L , we finished the cherry-brandy 

which he had been keeping for great occa- 
sions at the bottom of his canteen. And 
L — — , his eyes sparkling and happy, said to 
me: 

" By Jove, my boy ! It 's not every day 
that we demolish as many as that. . . ." 

Time was when Captain G , seeing 

some Bavarians debouch at fifteen hundred 
53 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

meters, hesitated before giving the order to 
fire.. Later he confessed to me: 

" I had a momentary feeling of immense 
pity when I saw those active, breathing 
young men who were going to be massa- 
cred and whose existence lay wholly in my 
hands . . ." 

That perplexity does honor to Captain 

G . Nevertheless, I must add that his 

battery opened the fire of hell on the enemy 
column, annihilating it. Since then, Captain 

G has been severely wounded. He has 

come back from the front mutilated. He 
has experienced to the full the adversary's 
methods of combat. He knows these scru- 
ples no more. 



Having been for so long on the watch, re- 
tired within ourselves and alone, on this 
height, we have acquired a strange perspi- 
cacity, harassing and acute. We know one 
54 



THE BURNING GAZE 

another to the bottom and we know very 
well, too, what we are worth. Newcomers 
are embarrassed by the hard, searching 
glances we give them. People try to avoid 
those glances when we descend into the plain. 
We see through people too easily and even 
when we smile we are sizing up what they are 
feeling and doing. 

The ordinary passions that held us once 
have lost their strength and their attraction. 
Events, spectacles, suffering affect our hearts 
differently from the way they once did. The 
instinct of the chase, of self-preservation, a 
few naked and precise ideas, senses that are 
pure, clean, penetrating, possess us and alone 
direct us. The details of the phenomena of 
life and death do not interest us any more. 

We have thrown our former personalities 
into a common mould; and from the stream 
of youth and energy which they form we have 
drawn forth identical individualities, fervent 
and simplified. 

55 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Vigorous, piercing glances eager to ferret 
out, track down and taste the abhorred and 
deadly prey, can you any longer adapt your- 
selves to the little tendernesses of life, its 
peaceful, natural activities, its lesser, briefer 
sorrows, will you ever again veil yourselves 
with tears? 



This dynamic, magnetic power of the eye 
which makes us foresee the position the en- 
emy is going to take, follows him into the 
thicket and drives him to his fate, this lumi- 
nous snare sometimes disquiets us and makes 
us tremble ourselves. It seems as if a mys- 
terious faculty of divination had risen up in 
us. I recall with a pang that last year in 
Artois a tall old lieutenant came to our 
observation post close to the enemy lines. 
He wore with an air of easy elegance a dark 
old-fashioned uniform. His sad, grave, res- 
olute face was crossed with a long, silvery 
56 



THE BURNING GAZE 

moustache. Careless of the bullets and the 
crashing shells he took off his cap, exposing 
his head with its grey temples. I remarked 
to him that persistent temerity might not 
only cause the death of our men — which, on 
the whole, he might not consider very impor- 
tant — but might also cause the destruction 
of our observatory, which was an excellent 
one. He replied, loftily : 

" I am here to accomplish my mission. 
Nothing else concerns me." 

He walked on, still feverish. But he had 
become more prudent. His energetic expres- 
sion attracted us. His long flexible neck, 
corded with projecting veins, one of which 
was especially purple and swollen, impressed 
us, held our eyes wide, I scarcely know why. 
Three days afterward, while I was on my way 
to the battery past the branch-trenches I 
stood aside to give passage to two stretcher- 
bearers who were carrying a wounded man. 

I turned and recognized Lieutenant M , 

57 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

lying helpless. He had at his neck a great 
bloody star. 

It seems absurd, no doubt, to extract a 
meaning from this singular fact. But have 
not certain animals the tragic gift of fore- 
seeing the approaching death of beings that 
surround them? And has not the war in cer- 
tain respects thrown us back to the primal 
simplicities? 

Absurd or not, a strange, superstitious 
fear has forbidden us since that day to scru- 
tinize too insistently the faces that are dear 
to us. . . . 



58 



VI 



THE LAZAR-HOUSE 



THE fair young woman looks at me pen- 
sively. 

"If you return to your observation post," 
she says to me in a grave, sorrowful voice, 
" stop at the house which you find at the 

crossing of the roads to and . It 

is the farm where we used to live before the 
war. It has a modern appearance. But 
there is something odd-looking about it be- 
cause it was built on the site and even on the 
foundations of an ancient lazar-house. . . . 
You will tell us if the enemy's artillery has 
not too far destroyed it. . . ." 

A few days later, I passed by the strange 
house, its grey and red a crumbling ruin. 
59 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

. . . The bricks of a part of the facade had 
fallen right into the road, forming what 
looked like an inexhaustible stream of blood. 
. . . Some soldiers were living in the ruined 
farm. 



An attack took place yesterday. The 
prisoners are still packed in this devastated 
house. They do not talk together. Sus- 
picious, sullen, emaciated, they watch each 
other and us with a sly dread. A sergeant 
with great red moustaches, blue eyes, and a 
broad nose listens, motionless and attentive, 
to these words of a French lieutenant of in- 
fantry : 

" Your lying diplomacy is the laughing- 
stock of the whole world. It has reached the 
limit : no one will ever again believe what you 
say. Your leaders have dressed up the truth 
a little too clumsily. . . . Do you under- 
stand me, Monsieur Adolf? To lead a great 
60 



THE LAZAR-HOUSE 

people one must have a great character. . . . 
But you are not a great people. ... A band 
of slaves, that 's what you are. . . . Truth, 
liberty, one breathes such things in our coun- 
try ! As for yours. . . ." 

The phrases of my comrade reach me punc- 
tured by a sudden series of explosions. The 
enemy has again begun to bombard the road. 
The order is given to descend into the base- 
ment. 

This great cellar, with its massive vaults, 
its whitewashed walls, resembles an ancient 
hospital ward. ... In the blinking light of 
the candles, the lean, sallow aspect of the 
prisoners takes on an expression of austerity 
and suffering. Their faces with closed eye- 
lids and heavy jaws, their sorry air, their 
stiff angular bodies, give one the impression 
of a humanity that is unfinished, badly cut 
out, pushed forward into this epoch of ours 
with the Wows of a rifle butt. 
61 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

A sudden shock makes the walls tremble. 
The muffled explosion of a shell sends us a 
volley of stones and suffocating smoke. . . . 
An enemy projectile has cracked the heavy 
ceiling of the basement. Several men are 
thrown to the ground and covered with de- 
bris. They pull themselves up haggard with 
fear. By a miracle, nobody is wounded. 
The lights are kindled again. 

* * * 

We retire to the other end of the white, 
subterranean chamber. My confused eye en- 
dows with strange forms the beings about 
me and a feeling of hallucination invades me 
and masters my reason. 

It seemed to me that the world had returned 
to the year one thousand. The enemy shell 
that had perforated the ceiling appeared to 
have rent the veil of time and broken space 
asunder. So vast was the gap it had made 
that it had spanned the dead centuries and 
62 



THE LAZAR-HOUSE 

their secrets. ... In this decayed lazar- 
house the Middle Ages rose again, like a 
black spring jetting up from the past. 

In one corner I observed a number of 
human bones heaped up together like gnarled 
faggots gathered in the forest. Inadver- 
tently, someone struck them with his foot. 
The funereal pile collapsed. ... A sort of 
deep trembling communicated itself to the 
very fibres of our being. The most ancient 
sentiments agitated us, took hold of us ; we 
breathed the thick, despairing atmosphere of 
a thousand years ago. The violent phys- 
ical miseries that tormented our ancestors 
clutched at our flesh and infected it, as if we 
had been reborn in their exhausted, servile 
bodies. 

The Teuton prisoners, with sombre faces, 
press close together, ignominiously shudder- 
ing, a herd surprised by the storm. I am 
struck anew by their cadaverous masks that 
suggest the baffled intruder, their frustrate 
63 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

and backward sensibility, the barriers raised 
by their dark rancor. . . . They have come 
to life, those wretched serfs the reprobate 
" roturiers " of the Middle Ages, who raised 
up over the desolate earth famine, leprosy, 
and the black death. There they are, calam- 
itous and of evil omen, trailing with them all 
their mediaeval misery. 

Must we pen them up once more, those 
lepers whose deadly breath makes one shud- 
der? The long years have not gone by, the 
world has not been renewed. The agonizing 
scenes of ten centuries ago seem actual and 
familiar to me. 

With gestures that are intended to be 
brusk but are really controlled, simple and 
almost pious, our men distribute bread and 
preserves to the prisoners. . . . My com- 
rades seem like lords of the manor, equerries, 
plebeians and peasants, impassioned with 
charity and just come from the town to give 
alms to the fierce lepers, the plague-stricken, 
64 



THE LAZAR-HOUSE 

the criminals. . . . There is the page As- 
torg; Boniface, Robin the weaver, Oliver, 
Robert, Didier, Odon the tool-maker and 
Fulcran the goldsmith. . . . Taciturn, glut- 
tonous, the captives devour the provisions. 
Our soldiers, withdrawing to a distance, con- 
tinue to watch with burning curiosity the 
group of prisoners, swarming like immense 
hobgoblins in the shadow. . . . You would 
say our men were leaning over an abyss 
where the damned were writhing, having re- 
ceived their food and words of cheer. . . . 
An immense quickening pity rises up out 
of the crumbling stones of this lazar-house 
and mounts to our hearts. Time and space 
are lost ideas. (For several minutes I can- 
not even represent them to myself.) And 
suddenly bodies, objects dissolve and are vol- 
atilized into wisps of opaque mist and golden 
dust. Of the life that is dear to me, real to 
me, all that remains, all that exists is a 
soft, delightful feeling, a warm, pure idea. 
65 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Thought has separated itself from matter 
and its unworthy lusts. 



The enemy's bombardment has ceased. 
We all return to the ground-floor of the 
farmhouse. We assemble the prisoners, who 
are to be conducted to the rear. 

I go out. The air is cold. A sentinel, 
his hands crossed on a level with his face, 
looks as if he were holding aloft a straight, 
slender flame. It is a bayonet which the man 
is holding, at the cross-bar, and the steel re- 
flects the setting sun. 

The enemy has just sent us some phosphor 
shells. The holes they have dug begin to 
sparkle strangely. One might think they 
had burst in a soil full of diamonds. The 
cortege of prisoners, encircled with bayonets, 
ascends the road and is lost among the shad- 
owy fields. Evening falls over us. 



66 



VII 

MOMENTS OF STORM 

A POST of thirty-four Germans, sur- 
rounded on all sides, refuses to surren- 
der. We attack them from above with hand 
grenades and rifle-shots. An under-officer 
lights a cigarette in defiance of our men. He 
is struck down. 



A 305 has fallen. It passed through a 
house without bursting. It passed through 
another house and burst there. About sixty 
chasseurs were in it. Thirty killed or 
wounded. Groans and cries. One chasseur 
is cut in two, in the middle. He drags him- 
self forward on his hands, in a trail of blood, 
abandoning half of his body, and screams, 

screams. . . . 

* * * 

67 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

There are two brothers and their cousin, 
infantrymen, who have been condemned to 
death. At first their courage rose to the 
assault and the troop occupied the little vil- 
lage and chased out the enemy. Then, sud- 
denly, they started a panic. . . . 

They are on their way to execution. The 
cousin carries himself well. He even wishes 
not to have a bandage. But the two broth- 
ers. . . . 

As the shower of bullets strikes them, one 
of them cries out in terrible anguish: 

" Do not kill my brother ! " 

The under-officer weeps while he gives them 
the coup-de-grace with a trembling revolver. 



We are engaged in a task that has all the 
elements of grandeur. We are the exact, the 
disciplined executors of instinct. If the end 
were not very noble and very vast, we should 
not conduct ourselves quite as we do. When 
68 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

shall we be wise enough, worthy enough to 
penetrate into the hidden meaning of all these 
violent acts imposed on us by destiny? 

The words I have most frequently heard 
during the war have been, " Me, me, I, 
I . . ." 

At every turn men fling their personalities 
in one's face. War lays men bare. The 
natural being is revealed in the nakedness of 
his defects and qualities. Everybody thrusts 
his individuality upon one's attention. The 
passion to show oneself, to push oneself for- 
ward. . . . 

Lieutenant P , who is attracted by 

the idea of aristocracy, says to me: "Po- 
liteness is also charity. Today one easily 
distinguishes those who have a heredity of 
courtesy, who come of educated stock. The 
flimsy mask of the others that dates back 
only one generation falls away very quickly, 
69 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

while the men of race reveal their natural 
exquisiteness little by little and guard off 
every sort of moral maladdress. The former 
are all alike. Amid these searching ordeals 
you gradually fathom the latter." 

Exaggerated words, unjust and many 
times disproved. 



Passed through Bourget, Noisy-le-Sec, on 
the way to Verdun. We stopped two min- 
utes at Bourget. From the train, from the 
door of the compartment, we marvelled at the 
outlines of the monuments of Paris. A 
dream. The Eiffel Tower, the Sacre-Cceur, 
the Trocadero were darkly profiled against a 
bright clear sky. They looked as if they 
were built out of mist. How strange that 
impalpable appearance is ! . . . Little by 
little, regretfully, we left them behind. . . . 
Slender factory chimneys, shooting up- 
ward. . . . 

70 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

In our new position, on the opposite slope. 
The little road is pitted with shell-holes. 
Shrill whistlings, silken rustlings, concentric 
rumblings of numberless enemy shells. They 
have not buried the horses killed on the road. 
One of them has been covered up by a 150. 
He thrusts out his doleful head, wild, strug- 
gling. A terrible stench. 



At four o'clock this morning, I went with 
a wagon to a magazine that had been blown 
up to get some planks for our shelters. 
Charred to cinders. Walls tumbling down. 
Cracked and broken boards. Fire and ruin. 
There still remain many tapes of bullets for 
the machine-guns, and several shields. We 
hasten ; the wagon is not large enough. I 
lift a plank to my shoulder. All my men do 
the same. On the way back someone makes 
a joke. . . . The captain approves me: 

" Be the first to obey the orders you give. 
71 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Among us that is the best way to command." 



We attack today. Rain, snow, and hail. 
One sinks kneedeep in the mire. After a suf- 
ficiently momentous artillery preparation, 
our infantry fling themselves to the assault. 
They advance further than the appointed ob- 
jective. Brave, brave men! One would not 
have thought they could attack in such 
weather. We surround a Boche battalion. 

Just as L , the young doctor, asks 

me for a pair of scissors and distracts my 
attention from the battery, a splinter from a 
150 strikes my back. My clothes, my silk 
vest throw it off but I receive a terrible shock, 
just as if someone had hit me with a stick, 
struck me in the ribs with tremendous force. 
It makes a lump under my left shoulder, and 
my arm is slightly paralyzed. 

But what bothers me most is to remain in 
the mud for eight hours. My feet are en- 
72 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

tirely frozen, insensible. I put the shell 
splinter away — in my pocket. 



With a little cart, every evening, he car- 
ried a cask of water up to the place where 
the battery is. A shell came for him and 
killed his horse. The little cart is shattered, 
the horse disembowelled. The water slowly 
trickles out through the holes in the cask. 
The driver has fallen into the road. That 
was three days ago. No one dreams of pick- 
ing him up. 



In the ravine behind us an infantryman has 
fallen face downward on the earth. They 
lift him up. His face is black. The little 
cyclist cries out : " Oh ! a negro ! " 

He is an infantryman of the Regi- 
ment. Three rifles about him. He has been 
hit, wounded in the head and chest. He had 
73 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

time to rid himself of his tent-cloth and gun. 
He must have cried out in the night. 



Someone says to the captain : 

" Do not go out just at this moment. 
They are shelling the position heavily. 
Wait." 

" So much the worse," the captain replies ; 
" we 've got to relieve our comrades ; their 
nerves must be nearly gone. Come, for- 
ward ! " 

He gives the order. The company starts. 
A 210 falls in the midst of them. There are 
thirty victims. 

Four days later they find the captain's 
head. 



The Boche prisoners are rotten with ver- 
min. I took part in an examination. Sev- 
eral of them who were very young said that 

74 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

they would have surrendered long ago but for 
the " old fellows." 

An infantryman pulls away a shoulder- 
strap from one of the German uniforms and 
finds under it a swarm of lice. He flings 
it on the ground, swearing in disgust. 



Every evening at the moment of attack we 
hear the agonizing cries, the delirious screams 
of the wounded whom we cannot go to relieve, 
so terrible is the fusillade and the bombard- 
ment. 

Some of them, this evening, realizing that 
they are dying out there, in the most fright- 
ful position between the two banks of flame 
and without hope of succor, were seized with 
a violent and mortal fury. With heavy 
hearts, all too heavy, we heard the cries of 
anguish, the recriminations of those men who 
had given themselves to the uttermost and 
whom no one could help. . . . 
75 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" Barbarians ! wretches ! to let us perish 
so ! Barbarians ! Savages ! " 

Always these words come back to us. 
Each time, there is some man who is shamed 
into yielding to these mournful appeals. 
There is a crackle of machine-guns. He is 

seen no more. 

* * * 

Captain L is a great big jolly fellow, 

with ruddy cheeks and a gay, frank, mis- 
chievous eye, a man who has every reason to 
praise the good things of life. On the staff 
of a great general. Always in luck! 

He was informed yesterday that his 
** brother-in-law's brother " had disappeared, 
and was perhaps dead. Was the letter he re- 
ceived so very pitiable? 

It is a misty morning, very early. Cap- 
tain L comes out to the first line. All 

at once, before the astounded infantrymen, 
he leaps from the parapet, falling in the 
grass. . . . 

76 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

He crawls about, this gigantic dandy, for 
more than an hour, goes up to every corpse 
between the two lines and turns it over, seek- 
ing his relative. 

He comes back, his clothes soiled with blood 
and mire, his eyes wide with horror and pity. 
He has not found what he was looking for. 

Today he has recovered his smile, his 
happy, confident expression. 



Going out of my dugout I received a shock 
from a shell that brushed my head as it went 
whining by and scratched my left ear. . . . 
It is not a wound ! But for several days I 
have been deaf in my left ear. 

In order to receive communications over 
the telephone, I hold the receiver in my left 
hand at my right ear and write with my right 
hand. Good God, is it possible that I might 
be deaf some day, that I might no longer be 

77 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

able to hear, to recognize my dearest friend, 
music, my comfort and my consolation? 

As it is, I pity those who do not love music, 
the true truth. . . . 



Lunched with Captain C . . . . We 

ate in a tiny orifice. But it has signs up. 
They are changed as often as necessary. 

It is a " drawing-room," a " dining-room," 
a " smoking-room," — even a " bath-room ! " 

The cook wears at his throat an enormous 
iron cross. When the colonel goes to dine 
there, he puts on a Tarn o' Shanter and a 
white apron with a decoration; when it is 
the commandant, the apron and the decora- 
tion ; and when it comes to us, he modestly 
exhibits the iron cross alone. . . . 

* * * 

Craftiness, deceit, organization, — that or- 
ganization upon which they rely so much, 
— logic in crime, long and minute prepara- 
78 



MOMENTS OF STORM 

tion for theft and assassination, these are the 
essential marks of madness. 

Are we fighting an army of lunatics ? 

I have been struck by these coincidences: 
in Artois, the enemy occupied a wood that 
bears the name, La Folie ; in Picardy, on the 
Somme, our adversaries held another wood 
that also bears that prophetic name, La Folie. 

Twice we have attacked the Germans at 
these points. They were assaults of unprec- 
edented immensity. We, a people of modera- 
tion, of perspicuity, of reason, of pity, have 
sought to drive them out of those forests of 
La Folie! In spite of prodigious heroism, 
we have never succeeded. . . . 

A Northern writer would find in this 
the elements of a circumstantial symbolism. 
Even for our sceptical spirits, there is some- 
thing disturbing about it, something that al- 
most looks like a revelation. 
* * * 

War inflames the passions. This elegant 
79 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

under-officer is a gambler. When he can find 
no partners, he plays alone in his dugout, or 
in the ruined houses. The inappeasable 
thirst for adventure. . . . Out here, there is 
a sharper intensity in his gestures than when 
he used to play in his sumptuous haunts of 
old. I fancy he must have flung himself into 
the assault, staked his life, on the field, like 
a great sum of money on the green table. 
And he has lost . . . 

* * * 

I have at last succeeded in bringing to- 
gether a few original ideas, a few images that 
strike me as fresh and true. 

I have begun to arrange my word har- 
monies, to assemble my future phrases. . . . 

But a single banal idea of a comrade, sev- 
eral banal ideas. . . . Their tumult prevails. 
. . . And my thoughts fly like over-dressed 
dandies, terrified. ... It is difficult for me 
to find them again. 

80 



VIII 



A BOMBARDMENT 



NOTHING led us to expect this bom- 
bardment of our position. We had 
already received a respectable number of 
enemy shells. But the firing was uncertain, 
scattered. 

Very early this misty morning a few salvos 
arrived, at regular intervals. An enemy avi- 
ator took observations over us. Then the 
explosions ceased. The day was clear and 
auspicious. 

The young trees, rejoicing in their first 
leaves, swayed back and forth in the breeze. 
Grave and agile, the gunners loaded, aimed 
and fired with a strong methodical assurance. 
The lookout-man announced that we had set 
on fire the enemy battery which was our ob- 
jective. And our men, who know how to 
81 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

keep silence, continued, without stirring, to 
send forth their devastating projectiles. 



An hour after noon the first salvos of the 
bombardment arrive. The medical student 
rises up, in the midst of his battery, and cries 
out: 

" Rapid fire ! For one shell that arrives, 
let them have two ! " 

Before even one enemy projectile has burst, 
the gunners reply to the fire of the adversary. 

What follows is a vision of tragic and pas- 
sionate grandeur. Shells of all calibres rain 
on us: 105's, 130's, 150's, 210's. Four 
men are wounded. While they are being car- 
ried away under fire to the Refuge, a stretch- 
er-bearer receives a splinter of shell in his 
arm ; he continues to carry his heavy burden 
without seeming to notice that he has been 
touched. It is not till the next day that he 
deigns to have his arm dressed. 



A BOMBARDMENT 

Another wounded man, his face bitter and 
bloody, cries out: 

"All right, Boches! Triple the dose!" 

Their souls are so servile over there that 
as if by a sort of magnetism the order ap- 
pears to have reached them. . . . And the 
bombardment is redoubled in intensity. 

You might think that the soil was a sonor- 
ous wooden floor upon which great clumsy 
giants were stamping with hobnailed boots. 
You might think these great giants wished to 
trample under foot the men, the shelters, and 
our fine, swift guns. . . . How badly aimed 
their shots are! They strike, strike always 
at one side. Heavy, stupid anger. Not to 
be reduced, our battery continues to roar. 



Commandant H has come down to 

the Major. He questions the wounded. 

R , the maitre-pointeur, replies : 

" I was afraid I was going to be wounded 
83 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

somewhere else than at my post. But I was 
struck while I was pointing my piece. . . ." 

What splendid men ! The personnel of 
our group, slow, simple peasants of the mid- 
lands, live and move here with a heroism that 
is wholly free from emphasis and affecta- 
tion, familiar and, if I may so express it, 
modest. 

We return to our major's headquarters, 
fifty meters from the batteries. The bom- 
bardment thunders on without ceasing. 

All of a sudden two soldiers dash into the 
shelter. They are the sappers of our radio- 
telegraph post. A shell of high calibre has 
burst against their shelter. One of the two 
men is deaf and stupefied. I pour him out a 
glass. He drinks. We try to cheer him up. 
He does not smile. He understands noth- 
ing. His comrade explains : 

" You see, C had a very delicate hear- 
ing. ... It is broken. . . . His ear was so 
fine, so musical that he received and distin- 
84 



A BOMBARDMENT 

guished the most delicate sounds of the 
T. S. F. . . . It 's a pity." 

C looks at us with great candid eyes. 

" Are they still falling? " he asks. 

We all reassure him: 

" No, no, indeed." 

At that very moment two projectiles burst 
before our door. Their flames are long, as 
long, you would say, as the hair of a 
comet. . • • 



Evening is about to fall. It is half past 
six. Our cook has deserted his flimsy cabin. 
We do not know where he has taken shelter I 
Nevertheless, we must have dinner. The 

young Lieutenant L and I decide to set 

the table. We have a few provisions. 

The battle has begun again, violently, at 
our left. We hear the distant cannonading, 
like muffled thunder. . . . 

At seven o'clock the bombardment ceases. 
85 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

The light that we kindle is flickering and dull. 
Our retinas are still dazzled by the hard 
brightness of the explosions. 



86 



IX 



THE HOUNDS OF STEEL 

CAPTAIN G , who was severely 
wounded at the end of 1914, returned 
three days ago to take command of his bat- 
tery. 

With careful art he conceals the lameness 
of his right leg and wears with such a happy, 
easy grace the red ribbon of his Legion of 
Honor that you would say he was flaunting a 
scarlet rose some mistress had given him and 
that the perfume of it produced in him a per- 
petual, airy intoxication. An exquisite type 
of our officer, to whom Dumas would have 
ascribed the noblest adventures. 

Three hours after our captain's return, the 
enemy made our battery their target. An 
aviator flies very high over our position and 
87 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

regulates by wireless the fire of the German 
guns. 

Captain G gives our men the order 

to take to cover. 

The German signal-men get to work rather 
quickly. Their range is five hundred meters. 
An hour after they have taken their observa- 
tions, they send us an imposing number of 
big shells. One of our under-officers is killed. 
He did not want to take refuge in his shel- 
ter. Nonchalantly leaning against a tree, 
he was being shaved while this deafening bom- 
bardment was going on, by an improvised 
barber. The barber himself was wounded, as 
well as the man who was bringing him the 
water, taking his time about it. Our shel- 
ters and our guns are intact. A neighbor- 
ing beet-field, with its over-luxuriant plumes, 
has been ravaged. . . . 

Captain G comes up to me. Angry, 

sullen, unrecognizable, he exclaims : 

" It 's preposterous ! And the General 
88 



THE HOUNDS OF STEEL 

Staff has forbidden me to reply to these 
scoundrels ! We know the exact position of 
the battery that is bombarding us. And the 
commandant prevents me from answering 
them under the pretext that I would only be 
showing them our exact position. . . . We 
must give those fellows the impression that 
they have annihilated the battery ! I don't 
understand these new methods of warfare at 
all. Do you remember the first months of 
the campaign? Ah! replies did not have to 
wait then. How much better we fought! " 

" We fought differently." 

" Do you remember that Boche artillery 
we demolished the day I was wounded? " 



And we call up those victorious hours as 
if, by suggestion, the memory of them might 
give rise to a new triumph. . . . 

We have taken up our position under some 
stunted, twisted apple-trees, the branches of 
89 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

which, trailing wearily almost to the ground, 
conceal us admirably. The battle has been 
one of the wildest violence. But the day was 
so lovely that the very corpses, which we have 
not yet been able to gather up, seemed to 
preserve a strange happiness. . . . Sud- 
denly the captain gives the command: 

" Attention ! " 

Below at a distance of two kilometers, we 
see a troop of bluish-green dwarfs creeping 
through the high grass. They are pushing 
some dark cannon along before them, obsti- 
nately, fantastically, and plunging into the 
forest. Six pieces of 77 are placed in this 
way opposite our battery at the edge of the 
wood. 

We do not stir. There is a tense, dis- 
tressing silence: we permit them to install 
themselves. The captain sends us his orders 
on little bulletins. . . . Suddenly, we start 
a thunderous fire. One of our sections 
belches out its explosive shells on the enemy 
90 



THE HOUNDS OF STEEL 

material, the other sends forth ball shells and 
prolongs its fire on the fleeing men. . . . 
Amid the explosions we hear distant roarings. 
Our men laugh, a laugh long and mad. 



Today the captain has recovered his 
bright, engaging expression. Early this 
morning we, in our turn, squared accounts 
with the great pieces that bombarded us three 
days ago. Two of our aviators observed the 
effects of our fire, which found its mark. 

The bases of the guns are sunk deep in the 
earth, to which the pieces are so tightly af- 
fixed you would say it was the soil itself, our 
soil of France, that was discharging upon 
the enemy, through these long grey tubes, the 
avenging flame and death. The gunners 
have lived so long with their cannon that 
they have come to have the same vibrant 
grace; they are like rapid automatics, sup- 
ple and precise. The gestures of the men 
91 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

who charge the guns, have the violent and at 
the same time yielding elasticity of the pieces 
themselves, recoiling on their sliding runners. 
A fixed unity of many harmonious organs. 

The captain says to me: 

" I was wrong in my recriminations on the 
day of my arrival. I understand now that 
mask of persevering bitterness this long war 
has fixed on the faces of our soldiers, their 
patient efforts, their slow replies. 

" We believed, we who fought during the 
first months of the campaign, that we pre- 
sented the loftiest spectacles of human sacri- 
fice. It was not so. Today is the time when 
it is beautiful to fight and to dare. After 
many months of war great souls alone are not 
weary. Those in whom the fury lasts and 
who unite the cunning of the present with 
the audacity of the past are the first among 
men. The poignant reality that has for so 
long scorched their eyes does not discourage 
their glorious ambition. One stands as- 
92 



THE HOUNDS OF STEEL 

tounded before this abnegation that grows 
ever keener, before this tenacious heroism 
that permits no impairment of a conscience 
chilled by so many visions of ferocity and 
death. ... Of a race like ours we can hope 
everything." 

The battery has been silenced. The gun- 
ners have gone to their shelter. The captain 
caresses with his gloved hand the slender 
glowing spines of our cannon, that perpetu- 
ally hold out their smoking muzzles toward 
the enemy. Splendid huntsman, stroking his 
hounds of steel, forever leashed. 



93 



LOVE 



OUR FRIEND MUSIC 

OUR corps has been off duty now for a 
fortnight, in a sunny village the soft 
outlines of which rise peacefully against the 
quivering heart of a forest. 

The units impaired in the fighting have 
already been reconstituted and stoutly re- 
newed. Misery and hardship are forgotten. 
A moist, happy smile lingers in the corners 
of our pale mouths. 

We look at one another with a new joy. 
We admire one another. We recognize one 
another again. We love one another. Ten 
times a day we grasp the hands of comrades 
found again. My friends, you have touch- 
ing gentlenesses, unexpected generosities, a 
bright, childlike gaiety that we never ex- 
97 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

pected down there in those regions of mad- 
ness and death. 

For to be a soldier is to be a naked blade. 
It means to strip oneself of illusions, to stifle 
one's memories. It means to keep oneself 
single and strong for a sacred duty, for a 
sacrifice bitterly accepted. It is to make 
oneself dry, forceful, fit, a fierce and solitary 
soul from which the charms and amenities, 
the arts and all the radiant and peaceful 
graces of human society have ebbed away. 

In a sudden, confused vision I recall the 
hard, sharp violence of all our actions during 
that long turmoil. . . . We spent fifty-seven 

days just north of V , while the battle 

raged. And during that time I did not hear 
a single one of our men hum a refrain or 
whistle. Now and again they laughed in the 
midst of the uproar, passing back and forth 
a few gay or mischievous remarks. They 
never sang. 

But here, in this verdant nook where the 
98 



OUR FRIEND MUSIC 

rumbling of the guns is hushed in the dis- 
tance, we have once more found our dear 
forsaken friend, music. 

On an old, worn-out piano our command- 
ant has been playing Cesar Franck, Bizet and 
Mozart. 

Tomorrow, in the neighboring village, our 

comrades of the Regiment of infantry 

are to give a recital of chamber music. 

The radiant and mysterious face of music 
will bend for quite a long while over our 
hearts. 



We have come on foot, taking our time, 
by the white, winding road. But we are an 
hour early. We wait outside the door. 

The concert is to take place in the great 
grey hall of the primary school. A back- 
scene has been put up and a naive decora- 
tion painted on it. The programme is well- 
chosen : Beethoven's " Tenth Quartette," 
99 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Cesar Franck's " Sonata " for piano and vio- 
lin, the " Poem " of our great sorrowful 
friend Gabriel Dupont. The audience is an 
original one, variegated and throbbingly ex- 
pectant: the colonel of the Infantry 

and his staff; a commandant of sharpshoot- 
ers, with a thin, drawn face, crowned with a 
scarlet fez; some infantry officers, sad and 
reserved ; troopers bearing themselves ele- 
gantly ; black soldiers from the Antilles and 
Reunion, with noble carriage and eyes 
drowned with nostalgia ; a few artillerymen^ 
several doctors and, finally, a number of foot- 
goldiers, young and old, crowded together on 
the piled benches. Some have clambered up 
on the ledge of the immense bay, and their 
opaque, pathetic silhouettes stand out 
against the bluish light of the windows like 
the figures of martyrs on the stained glass 
of a church. 

The opening measures of the Beethoven 
Quartette rise up amid the intent silence, the 
100 



OUR FRIEND MUSIC 

heavy meditation of the subdued gathering. 
Impeccable and fervent is the execution of 
our soldier artists, who seem constrained in 
their tight, worn, faded uniforms. But we 
cease to think of the long arms of these fas- 
cinating violinists, cramped in their abbre- 
viated sleeves. As they develop, the phases, 
charged with serenity and love, weaving their 
learned harmonies, opposing their scintillant 
fluctuations, lose and find themselves again 
in faithful divergence. A vast tide of sweet- 
ness submerges the souls of all. Our eyes 
shine with the splendor of a dawn that is 
glimpsed, of a presentiment of glorious hours 
approaching. . . . 

Comes a brief interval, during which Lieu- 
tenant P , enraptured, says to me: 

" It 's understood, we shall get back Al- 
sace-Lorraine." 

" But I demand also that we annex . . . 
Beethoven." 

" And Wagner? " someone asks. 
101 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" Ah, no ! He 's too German. . . ." 
The beloved voice of the violin soars up- 
ward again above the rippling and tinkling 
of the piano. Franck's " Sonata," grave 
and simple, wonderful in its plenitude, muf- 
fled, flowing, swelling, like limpid water gush- 
ing out of the earth. We are attuned to 
this true, pure harmony. Everything that 
is best in us and sane rises up within us, un- 
folds itself and sings with this candid melody. 
The men who are listening now have retaken 
the Fort of Douaumont. They have seen so 
many blood-stained brothers fall! They 
have lived on an ocean of murder and feroc- 
ity! And behold, they are like a crowd of 
innocent children. . . . 

At last we hear the romantic modulations, 
so languishing, so tormented, of Gabriel Du- 
pont's " Poem." Dear, gentle Gabriel, so 
swiftly ravished from our affection, how 
troubled you would be if you could see us 
again grouped about your work, the beauty 
102 



OUR FRIEND MUSIC 

of which survives your fragility! You ef- 
face from the countenances of our men that 
sullen resignation, that obstinate weariness, 
that hopeless funereal abstraction. We bless 
you, in your still fresh grave, for bringing us 
tonight the consoling grace of your har- 
monious melodies, so supple and so fragrant, 
which take hold of us like arms that let fall 
a burden of blossoms before they embrace us. 

We set out again for our cantonment, 
happy, comforted, like pilgrims who have 
been pardoned, wrapped in thought. A long 
swift silhouette is moving on the road. . . . 

It is young Lieutenant L , anxiously 

running to meet me : 

" Quick, quick, old fellow ! We have re- 
ceived the order to move tonight. Hurry 
and buckle on your canteen. You precede 
the column. I have told your orderly to 
saddle your horse for two o'clock. . . ." 

I hasten my preparations. My cloak, my 
field-glass, my map-case, my revolver, in the 
103 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

flickering light of a candle. . . . L — 



very kindly helps me to pack up my traps. 
I try to get an hour's sleep. ... It is al- 
ready time for me to go. ... I leap on my 
horse . . . those wonderful sounds still ring 
in my ears. . . . Then everything is extin- 
guished. My heart is dry, my head empty of 
memories. Farewell, soft, tender music ! 
But I experience a confused uneasiness, a 
slight sense of shame! It is as if I had left 
a friend sleeping in the village, a friend I 
had not awakened to bid good-bye. ... I 
am afraid of being behind time. We trot out 

into the cold wind of night. 

* # * 

The secret, impassioned language of music 
has such nobility, such mysterious magna- 
nimity, that it alone would be able to trans- 
late for future ages the unknown grandeur 
of our soldiers' sacrifices, the whole violent 
scene that haunts our e} T es. 

But what musician will interpret the re- 
104 



OUR FRIEND MUSIC 

nunciation, the fierce resignation of our men, 
the loftiness of their mission, of which they 
are themselves ignorant, the delirium that 
persists in them, their courage, humble or 
elated, their willing or unavoidable disdain of 
death and happiness? 

Will my sagacious friend Vuillermoz point 
out to us just the right composer for this 
task? 

Everything goes to prove that this musi- 
cian will have to be very modern, of advanced 
and daring tendencies. He must renounce 
the out-of-date formula for heroism that has 
prevailed in the past. No more brass instru- 
ments, no joyous, well-cadenced hymns. 
Rather a heavy chant, slow, resolute, dim, 
with grave harmonies, patient, broken, dis- 
parate, spacious at one moment, dwindling 
the next. 

Who will render that air beaten out by the 
brutal sonorities, the prolonged uproar of the 
cannon, the thin whine of the balls like that 
105 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

of the mandolin, the repeated, balanced echo 
of the shells that spring across the valley, 
the rumbling of the motors, and then those 
eddying, stifled harmonies, occasionally that 
brief, mortal silence amid the gasping of men 
who are bidding farewell to life? . . . Who, 
finally, can relate the vibrant, chaotic disor- 
der of a battle, this ending of the world — 
or this beginning — that is all about us, these 
primeval horrors amid the roaring of the 
heavy guns that recall the monsters of pre- 
historic time, the mammoths and the dino- 
saurs? Who will dare to recall, in a voice 
that is true, any episode of this cosmic tur- 
moil ? 



106 



XI 



TRANSPARENT SOULS 

THE world ascribes to the people of 
France an agitation in life and in lan- 
guage that is no longer borne out by the ob- 
servation of today. Our men love silence. 
They have been used to living together so 
long and the events they witness are so over- 
whelming that perhaps they consider words 
useless and ideas vain. 

They speak little. They think little ; they 
try even not to think any longer of anything. 
I have often seen proofs of this stagnation of 
the spirit and the imagination in the bright- 
est and most intelligent souls. It undoubt- 
edly results from sheer weariness of the un- 
derstanding, the sadness of feeling oneself a 
stranger to the joys of old. 
107 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

But there is perhaps another explanation 
of it. A man only knows his place in the 
world through the contrasts and relations 
that he marks and measures about him. A 
life is rich and significant in proportion to 
the diverse and extended affinities and reac- 
tions which it discerns. 

How can a soldier establish these corre- 
spondences and these disparities that would 
augment and determine his own thought? 
However far his eye ranges over these re- 
stricted spaces, he can see nothing but war, 
nothing but soldiers who act and think just 
as he does. And at the extremity of this 
stifling horizon, death. . . . Consciousness 
withers and forsakes him. What remains is 
nothing but a prescribed personality, re- 
duced to a tame and strict regimen. His 
dull memory becomes torpid. There is noth- 
ing he can do. Everything in his soul is 
transparent and without depth, scentless, do- 
108 



TRANSPARENT SOULS 

cile, like water diffused over an immense 
space. . . . The soldier has slipped into his 
mental uniform. 



109 



XII 

IN THE RUINS OF THE ABBEY 

To Colonel G. Huin. 

THIS Sabbath morning is calm and veiled 
like a convalescent. The air is still 
sharp, the wind keen. But already the 
spring appears, furtively, through the out- 
worn scenery of winter. Some inexpressible 
feeling of frankness and goodness wells up in 
us. For an hour the struggle is forgotten. 

We set out for mass. It is to be said in a 
subterranean chapel. The blinking lights of 
the acetylene lamps pierce the semi-darkness 
of the corridors. Deep, tortuous passages 
have been hewed out of the stone by our 
unknown ancestors. 

After a stumbling journey of ten minutes 
through this cavernous obscurity, we reach 
110 



IN THE RUINS OF THE ABBEY 

a sort of crossing where an altar rises, 
adorned with ivy and branches of fir: clever, 
patient hands have cut it out of the rock. A 
few squat pillars, rudely decorated, labor- 
iously raise their masses like formless carya- 
tids. 

Already, the chaplain of infantry, in a 
grave, sad voice, has begun to roll out the 
sacred litanies, which echo, scarcely audible, 
down the reverberating caverns. 

Our men have grouped themselves at the 
rear. Their fierce, emaciated faces have lost 
their expression of bitterness. Here and 
there, the bluish gleam of the lamps lights 
up a wrinkled forehead, a pair of eyes moist 
or burning under shaggy brows, a mouth 
naively open. . . . Some of the men are tell- 
ing their rosaries ; we hear the light click of 
the beads. The strong and the brave have 
laid aside their violence. 

The medical student whispers to me shyly : 

" You might think we were in the Musee 
111 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Grevin, old fellow. . . . The first Chris- 
tians in the catacombs. . . ." 

Well may that vision disturb our memory. 
The short, embossed columns that uphold 
the stone roof or brace the low, black arches 
suggest the pilasters of the crypts of some 
fabulous palace of Babylon or Nineveh. . . . 
Such nobility has the war given to our men 
that in their postures I see again the im- 
perturbable rhythm of the warriors of the 
Assyrian bas-reliefs. . . . 

Opposite, those peasants, workingmen and 
poor folk have grouped themselves by in- 
stinct with an infallible harmony. What 
twilight Veronese, dimming the brilliance of 
his palette, will paint this new evangelic epi- 
sode in its strange, majestic ensemble? 

I know of nothing more touching than the 
spectacle of these hardy, hairy fellows whose 
way lies through every sort of horror and 
atrocity, suddenly becoming humble and sub- 
missive as if they were priests. 
112 



IN THE RUINS OF THE ABBEY 

There they pray, lost in adoration, over- 
whelmed with sacred melancholy. With ges- 
tures that are generous and pathetic they 
offer up their weary souls, freed from every 
impurity. 

Have pity, God, on them ; have pity on 
me. . . . Our sorrows and our miseries seem 
to heap themselves up before the altar and 
take fire there, and when the divine office is 
finished, we withdraw, renewed and healed by 
the vital and mysterious flame. 



We quit the dim, silent crypt and remount 
to the daylight. 

It seems as if we had passed to another 
planet. Shells are bursting down there with 
the hollow noise of immense empty casks, vio- 
lently struck. Ammunition-wagons rattle 
by and descend the tortuous broken roads, 
dragged along at a gallop. Files of infan- 
try disappear in the winding trenches. And 
113 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

below, in an improvised graveyard, some sol- 
diers are digging two ditches for those artil- 
lerymen whose blood-stained corpses have 
been covered over with tent-cloths. 

Commandant H has invited me to 

lunch. He is installed in an abandoned 
abbey, the ancient and venerable walls of 
which have been riddled, cracked, ravaged 
by the enemy guns. The chapter-room 
alone remains intact. It is there the table 
is laid. 

The village, the beauty of which is still so 
touching, sleeps on a height. The Germans 
have unchained their fury against the lovely 
church whose great towers, every day bom- 
barded, still dominate the horizon. These 
steep streets blocked with the ruins of an- 
cient houses, these ravaged sanctuaries, 
speak to the soul and fill it with vanished 
biblical images. 

A little more and one might think oneself 
114 



IN THE RUINS OF THE ABBEY 

in some Jerusalem besieged by the barbar- 
ians. 

The meal is simple. There are only three 

of us : the commandant, his aide, A , 

and I. The major speaks to us of the des- 
tinies of our country. 

Suddenly a deafening uproar makes the 
walls tremble. The cook, with the helmet 
of an English soldier on his head, dashes into 
the room. 

" My commandant," he cries, " two great 
shells have just fallen beside my kitchen and 
the stove with the fritters has vanished. . . ." 

Commandant H makes no sign. 

Calmly, gravely, slowly, he says : 

" Well ! Why do you wait to bring in the 
cheese? " 

And he apologizes for offering me so fru- 
gal a luncheon. 



115 



XIII 



AT DAYBREAK 



THERE is a thin tinkle at the telephone, 
and we dash to the instrument. A far- 
away voice informs us briefly : " The enemy- 
is attacking. Start the barrage fire." 

Immediately, all the gunners are at their 
posts. The night is illumined by dazzling 
whirlwinds of flame rolling over the indistinct 
crests of the landscape. White, green and 
red rockets flash across the sky and burst 
into bright, many-colored jets. The guns 
vomit their fire and, as they recoil on the bat- 
tery, resemble enfuriated gorgons, insatiable, 
drunken. Detonations mingle with explo- 
sions. It is like a mad gallop of heavy mon- 
sters over the vast, resounding levels. Innu- 
116 



AT DAYBREAK 

merable enemy shells split the air with their 
whistling, hissing screams, their long plain- 
tive cries, their dull roars, their deafening 
crepitation. 

With my feet half-frozen and plunged in 
the heavy, sticky mud, I transmit the orders 
of the captain, who presently gives the com- 
mand: 

" Slacken fire ! The attack is re- 
pulsed. . . ." 

After this, we only respond to the shots 
we receive. . . . Till morning we continue to 
fire. 



Little by little the darkness brightens. A 
diffused ashy light like the beginning of the 
world begins to spread over the atmosphere. 
A thin carpet of snow lies over the cloven 
earth, and the deep hollows are filled with 
mist and smoke. I glance at our men, at 
their harsh, wild faces, blue with cold and 
117 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

hollow with fatigue. Not one softening 
thought. Their hearts are closed to mem- 
ory. 

It is a company of strange automata I 
have about me, and I feel as if I had fallen 
into some nameless planet such as Wells has 
imagined. . . . 

It has been like this for two months. Not 
for a single moment has the intensity of the 
battle abated. Day and night the struggle 
goes on without respite. 

Our men are wonderful in their tenacity 
and courage. Never before has such pure, 
vehement energy coursed through French 
veins. A human wall, stronger than stone, 
stronger than fire, bars the path of the in- 
vader. These soldiers, dressed in horizon 
blue, striped with yellowish mud, are the sky 
and the soil of France in action. The ani- 
mated earth and the airy azure of the moth- 
erland have raised up in their image these 
118 



AT DAYBREAK 

unconquerable defenders made of a fragment 
of our sod and a fragment of our firmament. 



The landscape gently rises and casts off 
the veils of mist. The bare summits with 
their skeleton trees rise above the smoky 
valleys. Is it true that the spring began a 
whole month ago? Here no green thing 
shoots forth and the buds refuse to break on 
the blasted branches. Everything still pre- 
serves the severe, somnolent aspect of winter. 
One thinks of the disconsolate verse of Bau- 
delaire : 

Le printemps adorable a perdu son odeur ! . . . 

At our left, the barracks in the town is on 
fire. The rising flames besplash the misty 
horizon. One might think it a vast Persian 
carpet, fringed with grey, tossing in the 
wind. . . . 

119 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" My dear lieutenant, you are not 
wounded? " 

It is G , chief of the second gun, who 

throws himself upon me. I have received on 
my left shoulder a blow like that of a pick- 
axe. I touch myself. It is nothing. My 
clothes have acted as a buffer; the splinter 
has rebounded from the material without 
passing through. 

But another shell bursts in front of the 
fourth piece. A cry. Murmurs. Five of 
our men are wounded. No one killed. The 
captain runs up. Gravely he examines the 
little bleeding wounds. " Nothing serious/' 
declares the ambulance orderly. 

Swiftly they dress the injured men. And 
detaching themselves from the heroic light of 
morning, a few bent and shadowy silhouettes 
move away from the oncoming dawn. . . . 



120 



XIV 

GLEAMS IN THE SHADOW 

IS it possible that the image of a son, a 
father, a lover can live on so intensely in 
the heart of women who remain behind? 
How many we see wandering, haggard, alien 
everywhere, in whom those the war has en- 
tombed rise again to life ! . . . Great family 
of the hallucinated, of over-febrile sensibili- 
ties, double souls, doubly unhappy, fierce 
ones who insist on retrieving from death a 
strangely living memory, will the world keep 
for you, during the years that are to follow, 
the fervent pity it owes you? Ah, how it 
makes us long not to die out here when we 
think of you. . . . But we forget you, you 
who do not forget. 



121 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Living amid this daily returning horror, 
one acquires a quivering sensitiveness, an un- 
dreamed of modesty of feeling that covers an 
animal-like simplicity. 



On bad days there steals over us grad- 
ually a weary stupefaction, a dull indiffer- 
ence to the quality and shapes of the things 
about us. Our consciousness is scattered, ab- 
sorbed in the atmosphere, and we feel a con- 
fused horizon disclosing itself; vistas of the 
future open out before our dull gaze. . . . 
We are less moved by the precise aspect of 
things and people than by something inde- 
scribable that vibrates beneath them, by the 
mystery that enwraps them and illumines 
them, by their psychic prolongation, as a 
philosopher might say. . . . We no longer 
distinguish the past, or the present either. 
Our souls strain toward the future. It may 



GLEAMS IN THE SHADOW 

be that a little of the light of truth pene- 
trates us. . . . 

* * * 

My best friend here is Lieutenant L , 

who is very young. Under his air of the 
little " taupm " he conceals the soul of a 
logician, as cold, as old as the world. He 
has keen, keen eyes, eyes which, with a teas- 
ing, disconcerting swiftness, can reveal for 
you a man's secrets. And I say nothing of 
the way he has, truly a fine art, of touching 
the best-hidden wounds ! Because I know 
his real fineness, he pleases me least when he 
likes to seem supercilious. People think he 
is cruel. He works well and hard. He dis- 
trusts his quick sensitiveness as if it were an 
enemy. In tragic hours I have known him to 
reveal an exquisite, devoted soul. Let me 
thank him for it here. One day, when he was 
wounded in the head, I realized that I loved 
him like a brother. 

123 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

The little clean-shaven sergeant, whom the 
division has sent me for a signal-man, is talk- 
ative and has an air of elegance and author- 
ity. From among his many observations, 
delivered with a smiling scepticism, I recall 
these words: 

" We don't sufficiently appreciate that 
modern war is, above everything, a theatrical 
performance." 

The Germans seem to understand this, 
they who in their official communiques entitle 
their fronts, — " Western theatre," " East- 
ern theatre." . . . Their kaiser seems to me 
a veritable stage manager — of a tragic 
stage, of course. . . . To astound the adver- 
sary, to stupefy him with emotion and terror, 
that is the idea. Speaking quite sincerely, 
when I mounted the parapet at the head of 
my section during the last attacks, I had the 
impression of finding myself on an immense 
platform with scenery. . . . Our cries, the 
explosions of our grenades upset the enemy 
124 



GLEAMS IN THE SHADOW 

more than the losses we inflicted on them. 
We do not take sufficient advantage of our 
grenades, which burst with a redoubtable 
noise. We ought to use them and the shells 
alone. In advancing, we should astound the 
enemy with a horrifying uproar. ... It is 
an odd thing, in battle one assumes without 
effort and as if by instinct the exaggerated 
poses of artless tragedians. ... It is the 
theatre, lieutenant ! — the Shakespearian 
theatre, my boy, where all the heroes of the 
piece are killed at the denouement, the " thea- 
tre of life," where people die. . . . 



125 



DEATH 



XV 



FLASHES OF THE SWORD 

QUARTER-MASTER LEBEL has been 
killed, the first of our unit. A rough 
face, heavy, blue eyes, a long blond mous- 
tache. A joker, a jolly fellow, always talk- 
ing to the peasants. And also, I believe, 
timid. Thirty-nine years old. Married to 
a very pretty woman, he told me with satis- 
faction. Hard with the men, exacting in 
matters of duty. A good head gunner. 
Haughty or listless in the presence of his 
superiors, who never had very much sympa- 
thy for him. 

On May 14th, in the evening, after having 
been thrown with him daily for a month and 
a half, I was able to catch a brief glimpse of 
129 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

his soul. ... It was raining. A sombre 
sky. Slipping into the tent I found him 
weeping. He was writing a letter. . . . 
And people called him harsh and hard- 
hearted. 

" This mournful war ! " he murmured. 
" My father is dying and I cannot go and see 
him again. ... If I could only embrace him 
once more. . . ." 

Just then his team arrived. Bruskly, with 
the back of his hand, he brushed away his 
tears. He seized the mallet, drove in the 
stakes energetically, stretched the ropes, in- 
spected the horses' feed. 

The next day Lebel was to go with me, at 
half past two in the morning, to the new posi- 
tion of our battery. It was still dark when 
we set out. I was to be on duty at the 
observation post. I left him near the guns, 
sad, his shoulders drooping. 

At nine o'clock I left the observation post. 
The enemy had discovered the emplacement 
130 



FLASHES OF THE SWORD 

of the battery. They were bombarding us. 
The great shells were bursting all about. 
The fire of the battery was on the point of 
recommencing: a single gun was going to 
shoot. But the captain, an old man, fresh 
from the clearing-station and thoroughly of- 
fensive alike in his sentiments, his manners, 
and his expression, orders a general muster. 
Lebel comes out of his burrow. At that very 
moment, an enemy shell falls on the shelter 
where the ammunition is, throws everything 
into disorder, bursts, and flings our own pro- 
jectiles far and wide. Lebel falls, his breast 
and abdomen torn, one arm blown off. They 
carry him away. His mournful eyes are 
heavy with reproaches. 

He tries to speak, without succeeding, and 
dies. ... A minute after, the third gun fires. 
All our men are at their posts. 



Quarter-master Carriat commanded the 
131 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

piece that fired while Lebel was dying. A 
great jolly fellow, clumsy, always laughing, 
apparently without either authority or char- 
acter. He had no love for the marmites and 
threw himself on the earth whenever they 
came. But at critical moments he was un- 
equalled in audacity and coolheadedness. 

It was eleven o'clock. We were having our 
lunch outside when two 105 shells burst over 
the battery. Berthon, the ambulance man, 

had his head blown off. A , the big 

gunner, was ripped open in the chest. 
Finally, Carriat received a shot through the 
shoulder and a ball in the abdomen. 

Everyone took refuge in the branch-trench. 
I heard Carriat cry : " Help ! Help ! " 

I don't remember quite what happened 
then. I went out alone and flung myself on 
Carriat. I took him in my arms and carried 
him to the trench. The shells began to fall 
again ; my wounded man was heavy. Some- 
one brought a stool out of the trench, and I 
132 



FLASHES OF THE SWORD 

began to take off his jacket. The splinter 
that had entered his shoulder had made only 
a small wound. The blood trickled out 
slowly in a thin stream. 

I said, in all sincerity: 

" It 's nothing serious. A scratch, — 
you '11 be all right soon." 

Carriat turned white, then greenish, then 

grey, then black. . . . Two men, A and 

Ch , dashed out to get the stretchers be- 
longing to a battery of 75's, two hundred 
meters behind us. The plateau was being 
shockingly bombarded. 

I ask myself how the two men can get 
back without an accident. Salvos of 105's 
and 150's are falling without interruption. 
Finally, one lands on the other wounded 
men. . . . Eight days later Carriat died. 
We all supposed he had been only slightly 
injured. We have sent the military medal to 
his family. 

Throughout this whole tragedy I felt as it 
133 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

were intoxicated with a pure and lofty sense 
of freedom, which death and the supreme 
emergencies of life could not diminish. . . . 
Three days later, the captain gave me this 
note: 

" You held yourself well under fire." 
But, all the same, he opposed my promo- 
tion from a second lieutenancy. . . . 

* * * 

Berthon, the ambulance man, had only 
arrived at the front a month before. A 
brave fellow, young, delicate, and very gentle. 
He loved hard work. 

He had even been a pointeur. . . . Since 
we had been at our new position, he had been 
digging with a surprising tenacity, coming 
to the aid of his comrades who were con- 
structing shelters. 

He had taken us into his confidence. For 
two years he loved a young servant of his 
brother. They had a child which he was 
134 



FLASHES OF THE SWORD 

bringing up. He expressed his desire to 
marry her before his military service, and 
again before his departure for the front. 
. . . And then . . . 

I said to the captain: 

« \y e have a duty to fulfil toward the or- 
phan. Do you think it would be a mistake 
to write to the mayor or to Berthon's par- 
ents to tell them about the intentions of that 
poor fellow? " 

The captain, who had confessed to us the 
excesses of his own disorderly youth, replied : 

" So much the worse for them ! Why 
didn't they get married? Bastards don't 
interest me. . . ." 

There were tears of rage and impotent pity 
in our eyes. 



My God, could any ceremony have been 
more impressive than that mass, said in the 
little church of Anzin, for Berthon's burial ! 
135 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

The nave was entirely dark, except for the 
faint, twinkling light of a few candles. Four 
infantrymen — killed in the village square — 
lay, fully dressed on the stretchers. . . . 
Berthon's body was in a coffin, for we had 
bought the planks to make one for our com- 
rade. The others were to be thrown into 
the earth, without anything. . . . 

An old priest timidly sang the mass; and 
a sister of charity, sixty years old, under- 
took the office of sacristan and choir-boy. 
She said the responses in a sad, tremulous 
voice. . . . What a desolate spectacle. . . . 

The captain stood beside the grave and 
spoke a few words. It embarrassed us to see 
him venturing to discourse so loudly in that 
solemn, heavy atmosphere of death. . . . 



It is a poor grave, adorned with a cross 
made of two sticks. At the top is inscribed, 
awkwardly, hesitatingly : 
136 



FLASHES OF THE SWORD 

" Zouave ? ? Chasseur ? ? " 

Soon afterward, the body was disinterred. 
. . . We buried it again. A second shell 
uncovered it. It was given another reverent 
burial by the sad, devoted men. 

But still a third shell flung the ghastly re- 
mains in the air. . . 

The men now call it " the clown." 

When a shell strikes near the grave and 
they see the earth and bones flying about, 
they say, indifferently: 

"Hello! There's Gugusse jumping 
again ! " 

By what malediction is that nameless 
thing pursued? 



The receivers fastened to his ears, the tele- 
phone sergeant transmits the orders of the 
lieutenant on observation. Enemy shells are 
bursting close about the post. . . . He pays 
no attention to the firing. His mind is pas- 
137 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

sionately intent on its object. . . . One tele- 
phonist has just been hit, mortally. Covered 
with blood, he crawls to the feet of the ser- 
geant, clasping his legs in a wild and final 
embrace. And the sergeant keeps on tele- 
phoning, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, 
feeling nothing. ... At last, the arrange- 
ments finished, he rises and finds himself alone 
with his dead comrade, encircling him with 
his supplicating and already rigid arms. . . . 



We flounder heavily through the trenches. 
We glance about. The soil looks dry. 
There is a sharp, complex odor, an odor of 
corpses. I question a spirited little lieu- 
tenant : 

" Well, there 's nothing surprising in that. 

Since the last attack, they 've buried the dead 

in the trenches. . . . Little by little, the 

earth that covers them has grown thin. And 

138 



FLASHES OF THE SWORD 

we slip over the gelatined legs of a lot of 
corpses. . . ." 

The man with me has a desperate look, 
wild, indefinable. 

* * * 

In the trenches taken from the enemy in 
our May attacks. Full of sand-bags of 
many unexpected colors. Evil-smelling saps, 
still bedraggled with the equipments of the 
Prussian guard. From one parapet issues a 
withered, bony forearm, terminated by a 
hand of which the fingers are dried and skele- 
ton-like. The soldiers have made a hat-rack 
of it. Quite as a matter of course, they 
hang their helmets on it. 



The explosion of a shell has buried this 
Prussian in a curious way. His head and 
his legs are entombed. His shoulders and 
139 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

back are exposed, in an upright position, 
against an abutment over a firing-bench. 
And to mount the declivity of the trench one 
uses the soft, broken, putrified shoulder as 
a stepping-stone. . . . Death is no longer 
the mysterious power, chilling, sovereign, of 
old. We brush against it without taking 
fright. It is a familiar personage who bores 
us, disgusts us, benumbs us. . . . We smile 
at it sometimes, sometimes we shake our fists 
at it as at the enemy — when it has been too 
abominable. 



140 



XVI 



A MEUSE NOCTURNE 



WE were shut in by the night as by a 
great black prison. Supply wagons 
encumbered the road. The men were busily 
piling the projectiles in the ammunition shel- 
ters of the batteries. In their haste to get 
away the drivers scarcely set foot to the 
ground. 

The whistling of the shells rent the air of 
night. A horse pranced on the resounding 
earth. Moving silhouettes revealed them- 
selves with precision in the sudden flash of 
an explosion. And we heard a great cry. 

A projectile had fallen on the horses of 
an ammunition wagon that had just been 

emptied. The middle driver, C , was 

killed. The forward driver was thrown 
141 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

under the wheels of a cart and severely 

wounded. The rear driver, G , lightly 

hit, was dragged off into the night by the 
maddened horses of the grating wagon. 

Two hours later, we saw G coming 

up, driving alone in echelon the three teams 
of his ammunition wagon. Calm and pale, 
he saluted the adjutant and unhitched the 
horses. He went to rouse his comrades at 
their gun. Finally, he wept, telling them 
that C was dead. 



They carried C 's body to the Refuge. 

. . . He had not suffered. A splinter struck 
him in the heart. He was a great fair-haired 
fellow, boisterous and gentle, a brave, care- 
ful soldier. The men of his gun felt for him 
an almost reverent admiration. " Though 

he was a mason," S said to me, with 

tears in his eyes, " he could have got the 
better of many in geography." 
142 



A MEUSE NOCTURNE 

He had talked to them about beautiful 
countries, with enchanted names, and about 
the burning tropics, and he transpierced their 
shut-in hearts with exaltation and nostalgia. 

N , the forward driver, had twenty 

wounds and two broken ribs. Doctor 

B , after dressing those that were most 

urgent, sent him away, assuring him that he 
would get well. He did not utter a word of 
complaint. With eyes dilated and swimming 
in tears, he murmured : 

" I tell you I saw the shell coming toward 
me; I saw it swoop down, like a red hawk, 
just beside me." 

The ambulance men, incredulous, listened 
to him with a pitying irony. 

" Yes, yes, my boy, but you must keep 
quiet." 

Two more projectiles burst in the neigh- 
borhood of the batteries. One would have 
said they had overturned the shadowy ram- 
parts of the night, for immediately there ap- 
143 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

peared a sort of ashy dawn, fringed with 

rose. 

* * * 

We were discovered by the enemy. All 
day he continued to send us asphyxiating 
and tear-shells. The soldiers have worn their 
masks. And we have the air of taking part 
in some dismal masquerade. 

In the midst of the incessant bombard- 
ment our men, by a miracle of ingenuity and 
courage, have hunted out some planks and 

put together a coffin for C . . . . Stout 

Ch himself, who has n't the reputation 

of exactly loving the clatter of shells, ran 
about, leaping like a mad goat, amid the 
explosions. He was looking for leaves and 
branches, on that smoking, devastated hill, 
and he found enough to bind together and 
make a verdant cross and a crown. 

Captain D came down to the Refuge 

to place it on C 's bier. He came again 

at the end of an hour. 
144* 



A MEUSE NOCTURNE 

" I have given orders for them to carry 
the coffin as far up as the position of the 

battery. So C will spend his last day 

among his comrades. . . ." 

Captain D reflected a moment. 

Then: 

" It 's curious," he confided to me, " I 
thought I should be completely upset when I 
saw C 's body, and I was not deeply dis- 
turbed. I wanted to help put him in the 
coffin myself. My reverent hand did not 
tremble. You see, his poor corpse is too 
ravaged, too different from what we have 
known. I have in my memory a lively, happy 
image of that remarkable soldier. I shall 
keep it. However unkind and deforming 
death was to him, it has left him with me 
intact." 



The coffin, trimmed with a few leafy 
branches, remained till evening at the head- 
145 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

quarters of our battery. The enemy never 
ceased firing at our position. We feared 
lest a shell might injure the sad bier, so la- 
boriously constructed. The humble remains 
were confided to our care, and it pained us 
that this tumult might once more disturb the 

last sleep of the unhappy C . The tear 

shells of the adversary set floating through 
the air their clouds of incense and odors of 
wax. . . . 

At nightfall, the officers of the group and 
the men of the battery gathered about the 
coffin. All raised their helmets. Captain 

D had scribbled a few notes on a paper. 

The voice of the commandant rose, clear and 
strong, amid the orgy of artillery that was 
letting itself loose. It brought us words 
of comfort, hope and energy. Beside me, 
L had tears in his eyes. 

"What's the matter?" 

" My dear fellow, I can't help it. . . . 
those tear-shells. . . ." 
146 



A MEUSE NOCTURNE 

" Come now, this is a nice time when 
they 've stopped sending us any, and the 
wind lias blown the poisonous mist away." 

" You bore me. ... I tell you they still 
make my eyes smart. I shall have to put on 
my mask. . . ." 

And turning his back on me, L ac- 
tually takes out his mask and conceals him- 
self behind it. 



The men slept, fully dressed, in their damp 
shelters. A heavy sleep, broken with night- 
mares and heavy cries. Our guns, their muz- 
zles casting forth tiny glints of steel, lay 
squat in the shadow like jackals with phos- 
phorescent eyes. 

Captain D was more moved than he 

had admitted. He could not bring himself 
to lie down. All night he remained near me, 
walking nervously about on the black, pow- 
dery earth of our position. But I could not 
147 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

distinguish any trace of emotion on his face. 
Some rockets shot up, sweeping through 
the night, which was no longer broken by the 
brilliant glare of the explosions. A heavy 
silence enveloped all things. And this de- 
ceitful calm on top of such a mad frenzy was 
more disquieting than the tempest of an at- 
tack. The feverish sentries kept their eyes 
tirelessly on the horizon where the enigmati- 
cal adversary lay concealed. 



148 



XVII 

THE SKELETON BEFORE THE TEENCH 

SEVERAL days ago we left those misty 
valley regions where we lived for more 
than a year. We were happy to quit them. 
But we left down there, amid the upheaved 
earth, good, sober comrades whom we shall 
never see again. 

A wild, mysterious resignation reigns over 
our hearts. We no longer keep any memory 
of the past. Our hearts are set on the pres- 
ent. We long to surprise the future. 
Later, memories will have plenty of time to 
blossom. . . . The few thoughts we have are 
pure and simple in outline, frank and direct 
in feeling. And action has driven melan- 
choly away. 

149 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Today, it is my turn to go to our new 
observation post. The sun has not yet risen. 
We breathe in the mist and the chill. The 
winding trench which we follow has retained 
the rain-water and it runs with the declivity. 
We sink in the mud up to the knees. We 
flounder. I see I must do something deci- 
sive. I remove my buskins and socks and 
lift as high as I can my drawers and my 
breeches. The telephonists follow my exam- 
ple. And lightened and fastened up, our 
calves exposed, our feet naked, we take up 

our march. 

* * * 

After several detours, several stops, we 
arrive at the appointed spot. The infantry- 
men look at us with calm, heavy eyes. Then, 
with joyous gestures, they crowd eagerly 
about us. The officers welcome me. It is 
not yet six o'clock in the morning, but early 
as it is they oblige me to smoke a cigar which 
they offer me. I am over-heated. 
150 



THE SKELETON 

A feeble, creeping breeze stirs and shakes 
the mist and liberates the uncertain light. 
In a few minutes, the contours of the strange 
landscape that opens before us have come to- 
gether, bathed in the reconciling dawn. 



I open out the chart. A captain of infan- 
try shows me the enemy positions and we 
make a survey of the horizon. Nothing es- 
capes the vigilance of my companion. While 
he is speaking in his deep, tense voice, I ob- 
serve our objectives. 

A stifled cry behind us makes me turn 

around. R , the telephone sergeant, his 

eyes wide and flaming, points to a spot to 
the west of the national road. His hoarse, 
hard words issue with difficulty from his con- 
tracted throat. 

" Down there, Lieutenant, do you see . . . 
there are fourteen of them ... I have 
counted. . . ." 

151 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

I do not at first distinguish what he is 
pointing at. Then, suddenly, with heart 
throbbing, in a calm, casual voice: 

" Ah ! yes. ... I see them. . . ." 

Quite at our left, before the parapet of the 
enemy trench, several long, blue spots. . . . 

They are our own men whom we were not 
able to relieve. . . . There they are pros- 
trate, their faces toward the sky, as if look- 
ing for vengeance and retaliation. . . . Some 
of them are face down against the earth, 
their arms crossed, so gently lying there that 
one would say they were embracing once more 
the well-loved soil for which they had died. 

I observe them with the field-glass. No 
distressing contortions, no disconsolate pos- 
tures. Their attitudes are harmonious, fas- 
cinating, dignified. They are as if struck 
with beauty. 

Why has no one been able to bury them? 
How long have they been there? 

Captain M interrupts my revery: 

152 



THE SKELETON 

" You are looking at those dead men down 
there. . . . We were able to drag three of 
them here. But eight others were massa- 
cred while they were on their way to seek 
their comrades. . . . 

" Two enemy machine-guns were turned on 
the pathetic group. We have tried to re- 
claim our men at all hours of the night. 
Every time the adversary discovers our pious 
enterprise. And when the wounded fall the 
Prussians continue to fire on them. ... It 
became necessary for the colonel to give or- 
ders to end these deadly excursions. If you 
knew how hard it has been to make the men 
respect those instructions 1 . . . How dull 
they are, those Boches ! Don't they under- 
stand how that melancholy vision increases 
our fury? But turn a little. Three hun- 
dred meters away, there, on the summit of 
the parapet, you will see something still 

stranger. . . ." 

* * * 

153 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

Sergeant R is half-strangling with a 

furious oath. A skeleton looks as if it had 
been set up in front of the German trench. 
It is on its knees. We distinguish a pair of 
blue breeches still covering the bent legs. 
The head and the arms are missing. We see 
nothing but the thorax of which we are able 
to count the ribs and descry the vertebral 
column. By what miracle is it standing up- 
right? Have our enemies placed it there to 
frighten those who are pursuing them? 

But behold! that skeleton is facing the 
enemy. From the silence of death it wrests 
a radiant, strong, implacable meaning. It 
seems still to bar the road of the barbarians, 
to forbid them to pass. It is there like an 
unfailing guardian, uttering an endless war- 
cry. What matter that the frail and per- 
ishable flesh has vanished ! The frame re- 
mains. It stands there, a symbol ? our will. 

We fight no longer merely In v last drop 
154 



THE SKELETON 

of our blood, but to the last grain of dust 
of our last bone ! 

A number of infantrymen are approaching 
us. The skeleton, the advance sentinel, still 
impresses on our souls its pure, powerful sig- 
nification. Is not this awful attitude better, 
my brothers, is it not better, Jean, Pierre, 
Paul, than burial in the breast of the obscure 
earth? Ah, God, if we must die, grant that, 
rising above the abyss, overleaping the be- 
yond, bursting the tomb asunder, our upright 
corpses may arrest and defy still, with all 
their outraged pride, the invading horde ! 



155 



XVIII 

A DESCENT INTO HELL 

has come to see me. His company 

has been relieved. He did not have 
the strength to go to his cantonment and has 
stopped at the position of our battery. 

Before the war, my friend was the most 
elegant of our writers, as much by the cut 
of his clothes as by the subtlety of his dis- 
course. Today, he wears a cloak bedraggled 
with mud, and boots that are unrecognizable. 
. . . His conversation is of a bold familiar- 
ity and he is the intimate friend of the sim- 
plest peasants of his country. 

F , who is hungry, has an irresistible 

feeling of sympathy for our cook. It is a 

rare and touching sight. My comrade has 

156 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

passed four sleepless nights. He cannot 
bring himself to take off the boots that cause 
him so much suffering. And you should see 
-with what infinite care our cook cuts the laces 
and draws them off. . . . He has even in- 
sisted on bathing the sore feet, covered with 
bluish swellings. The historic gesture and 
the sad fatigue of him who has provoked it 
touch us almost to tears. 

We have rubbed and dressed the poor boy. 
And now, he laughs, happy, his eyes still 
strange and weary. Once more I recognize 
that strong soul of his. When he speaks, 
you feel yourself in tune with some inde- 
scribable melody and everything that is best 
in you springs up in your heart. 



After his rest, I accompanied F to 

his cantonment. We had some long talks. 

Once more I found him the lover of grand 

ideas, the passionate devotee of rare truths. 

157 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" You must n't think," he said to me, 
" that the war has brutalized me. Even the 
ferocious acts we are obliged to commit seem 
to me without significance. . . ." 

"Just how do you mean? " 

" Our murderous ancestral habits have re- 
conquered us perhaps, those inheritances 
plunged in the depths of the ages as in an 
ocean which the storm throws up again to 
the surface. But I doubt if I have ever been 
so free from the sluggishness of matter, from 
the standards of the brute, as I have since I 
was thrown into this tragic chaos of men and 
things." 

" Impenitent idealist ! " 

" Wait a moment. It is as much so with 
you as with me. And what would remain 
for us if we could not escape from this circle 
of hell?" 

" We should appreciate better the simple, 
terrestrial joys that we have scorned. . . ." 

" No, on the contrary, I think that the 
158 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

unheard-of devastations of this war 

strengthen the mystical things and show us 

the true value of the goods of life. . . . One 

single message from these troublous times 

inscribes itself, in letters of fire, on the proud 

conscience: to seek amid appearances and 

agitations the central truth and the inner 

strength of things." 

" I hardly grasp statements of that 

kind. . . ." 

* * * 

F • paused. He looked at me intently. 



In a deep anxious voice he replied, fever- 
ishly : 

" Listen. I have told no one else what I 
am going to tell you. They would think me 
mad. But you, you perhaps will be able to 
understand it. . . . And I need to express, 
to get outside me, to put into words, 
these memories that scorch and haunt me. 

" You know we made an attack four days 
ago. The enemy was forewarned. To our 
159 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

artillery preparation, he replied with a coun- 
ter-preparation which lost us a good many 
of our men. Before we came out of the 
trenches a third of the effectives of our com- 
pany were disabled. At the moment when 
we leaped over the parapet, we heard the 
cries of our wounded, our dying. Our objec- 
tive was the cemetery of P . We 

bounded out, intoxicated, eager to come to 
conclusions with the enemy and existence. I 
pass over the incidents, the usual ferocious 
incidents, of the attack. . . . 

" At last we arrived at the cemetery, which 
was slashed with trenches, in a confusion of 
scattered bones and tombstones. For my 
part, I installed myself in a granite mauso- 
leum which had already served the enemy as 
a company headquarters. I remained there 
till the next night. 

" Can I give you any idea of how I lived 
in that place? ... At first, I was too fever- 
ish, too occupied with organizing our resist- 
160 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

ance. During the night, there were two 
counter-attacks which we repulsed. At 
dawn, I was actually able to sleep, in that 
tomb, for two hours. ... I awoke scream- 
ing, I don't know why. ... A moment after 
came another counter-attack. I saw the as- 
sailants descending the slopes, grotesque, 
fantastic, with their ludicrous masks, tum- 
bling, yelling. . . . We remained masters of 
the field, despite the intense bombardment of 
the adversary. I returned to my cave. 

" When things reach a certain degree of 
dreadfulness they become almost comic. I 
had a silent laugh as I thought over this sin- 
ister scene. But I was tormented with thirst 
and my canteen was empty. ... I had a 
sort of stroke of dizziness. The cold of the 
stone penetrated me. ... I was alone in the 
narrow crypt. I cast aside my helmet, feel- 
ing the need of talking, — perhaps to drive 
away a mysterious fear that came over me. 

" * Well, how are you ? ' I said, smiling. 
161 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

' You see I 've come to visit you, dear Death. 
. . . An unseasonable visit, eh? You tried 
to conquer me when I was struggling with 
you. Now I throw myself into your arms ; 
I embrace you ; I acquiesce utterly. I await 
your orders.' 

" I must have been speaking very loudly. 
Someone thrust his head through the opening 
of the cenotaph. I heard a whisper. Then 
a new evening enveloped us. We should have 
been relieved during the night. No one 
came. They had forgotten us. 



" I despatched several liaison men to our 
people. None of them came back. On the 
third morning the enemy himself seemed to 
be appeased. I was no longer in communi- 
cation with our headquarters. Already we 
were short of ammunition and food. As for 
me, I had nothing left, either to eat or to 
drink. Hunger was making me dizzy. And 
162 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

I did not venture to ask the men for a biscuit. 
As I looked about, a terrifying idea took 
possession of me: we were cut off from the 
living. A door had closed abruptly on life, 
on our past, and we were plunged in a night 
that was vast and black. 

" I stretched myself out on the straw in my 
sepulchre and tried to sleep. Racked with 
pain, crushed with fatigue, I finally reached 
the last extremity. ... I experienced an 
indefinable sensation: as I lay on my side, it 
suddenly seemed to me that I had risen out 
of my mortal vestment, that my personality 
had quitted my body. I saw my actual skele- 
ton, shorn of its muscles and twisted in the 
attitude which I had taken ; I saw my smooth 
skull, my striate thorax, my slender shin and 
thigh bones. ... It seemed to me that I was 
at the bottom of an immense flight of steps — 
and that I was being pushed even lower. A 
single ray of greenish light followed me like a 
glaucous eye. . . . 

163 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

" Presently, I heard something like the 
crumbling of the walls of a prison. . . . My 
liberated spirit eddied round, a keen, scanty 
flame, against the paleness of an unknown 
world. . . . And I had the grave, tranquil 
impression that I had entered into a compre- 
hension of the universal, that I had pene- 
trated into the heart of truth. 



" Things no longer had separate shapes, 
things were no longer far or near. I felt 
myself united, blended with all things. The 
worlds and the planets streamed together, a 
dense and acrid smoke. Stone and iron were 
no longer anything but transparent shadow. 
What surprised me was the dwindled size of 
this cold, stifling mist which to me repre- 
sented the infinite universe. In a tiny cor- 
ner of it, condensed, piled up, and as if stuck 
together, there swarmed a mass of minute 
moths, which were devouring each other. . . . 
164 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

" Little by little, the grey mass became 
denser and turned golden, and the flying, 
dancing molecules crowded still more closely 
together. . . . But it was all so small that 
a child could have held it between his fingers 
like a light handful of sand. 

" A bluish light cast certain outlines into 
relief. It seemed to me that I was more 
spacious than the earth and the sun and that 
my head struck against the stars the mild 
serenity of which gave to my soul a message 
of harmony, peace and love. . . . 

" Meanwhile, everything about me grew 
larger, and my spacious life contracted. . . . 
I returned to this sad globe of ours, which 
seemed to me a planet like the moon, dead, 
enclosed in a black shell, burned and cracked 
with flaming orifices. . . . Creeping hordes 
clutched and tortured this sombre thing 
which was for me the earth. . . . 

" Of a sudden, everything was transformed 
to the proportions of reality. Once more it 
165 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

seemed to me that some unknown aerial spirit 
was refashioning, with careful ardor, the 
framework of my body ; it polished the bones 
of my skeleton, curved the ribs and reassem- 
bled the elements of my frame, like the pieces 
of a complex machine; it arranged, united 
and connected the muscles and the sinuous 
veins, set in the eyes, pushed the brain into 
its bony box, laid in the heart, suspended the 
lungs in the pectoral cage. . . . When all 
the organs were fixed and united, it enveloped 
them in the robe of flesh. But this being of 
mine was frail and insignificant. By a thou- 
sand luminous strings the spirit attached it 
to the inscrutable substances of the universe. 
. . . The strange automaton developed and 
I was precipitately thrown back to my im- 
pressions of childhood. . . . 

" I found myself exhausted, broken, as if 
during the years I had wandered the world 
over. 

" An hour later we were relieved. I expe- 
166 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

rienced an indescribable sense of humiliation, 
like that of a slave. And I was surprised to 
find myself feeling as if an unknown force 
had thrown me back to the primal ooze. 



" Since then I remain persuaded that I 
have penetrated an essential secret and that 
the unheard-of sufferings I have endured 
have brought me knowledge of the absolute. 
... I believe that with trembling arms I 
have grasped the truth. I believe I have 
penetrated into the supreme simplicity, — 
simplicity, you understand. For that is not 
simple which puts trust in those two falla- 
cious spheres, our eyes, nor is that true 
which lives the common mirage wherein we 
agitate ourselves. 

" Do you remember that picture of Rem- 
brandt, ' Jacob and the Angel '? I keep see- 
ing Jacob, pressing to his breast, with all the 
force of his knotted muscles, the archangel 
167 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

who smiles with pity and glides away, rises 
and leaves that man so resolute to imprison 
him in his arms. . . . That is just what I 
have experienced. Can you understand ? A 
storm has convulsed the sleeping waters of 
my innermost being. 



"But the death through which I have 
passed in the fire of my thought has not 
given me absolution. It has corroded me, it 
has set its mark upon me. ... I have al- 
ways in my mouth a taste of cinders, a bitter- 
ness that nothing can efface. I abhor the 
leaders who direct this society of disorder 
and hatred ; I see them as cruel, selfish and 
base. I find in my fellow-creatures nothing 
but pitiful ugliness, falsehood, and injus- 
tice. . . . 

" I feel I shall not come back from the 
war. But what is most tragic in this is that 
I recognize my own stigma upon all my fu- 
ll 68 



A DESCENT INTO HELL 

ture companions under the soil. It is this 
that scorches me and haunts me. 

" Every moment, I look my life in the face 
and ask myself : c Have I accomplished my 
destiny as I should? Have I been good, wise, 
noble? Has my love been efficacious ? Have 
I helped those who are dearest to me? Have 
I done my share of the work of all the strong, 
dissatisfied, passionate souls who have passed 
through this life? Have my appeals been 
heard on this wide and shadowy road which is 
humanity ? ' 

"Do not try to console me. You would 
only increase my confusion and strengthen 
the conviction that is killing me. 

" Be assured, I shall do my duty like all 
those of my race. But to your friendly 
hands I surrender my plans, my ardor, my 
strength, that you may serve them, augment 
them, perpetuate them." 

* ♦ * 

Twelve days after this conversation my 
169 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

friend F died. Since then, his memory 

has been to me like a tempest. 



For a long time we have been dwelling 
under the earth, in the earth. In his heart, 
in his secret we have lived. What can we 
derive from it? And how can we bring it up 
to the surface of the world? 

Are we to become once more men of feroc- 
ity, slaves of the sovereign instinct to live 
and to destroy? Is more clay to be added 
to our scallop-shell of dust? Is our animal- 
ity going to be increased or are we going to 
quit this heavy tenement and rise again, pure, 
light, different? 



170 



XIX 

THE SLAVE OF MINOS 

DOCTOR B , whose fine sensibility 
we love, has been my companion during 
this icy night. With his nervous gestures, 
his lively eye, he has given me certain details 
regarding the death of my comrade, Lieuten- 
ant F . 

" Without doubt, F was a wonderful 

soul. But one can't help feeling that he died 
uselessly, foolishly. ... A veritable suicide, 
when you come to think it over. 

" The enemy had made a number of small 
attacks on the entrenchment defended by 

F 's company. I shall not dwell on the 

vicissitudes of that bitter struggle. You 

know them already. I found myself near 

171 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

the major, five hundred meters behind our 
friend, and we were preparing to intervene. 

F had repulsed three assaults, and the 

adversary did not expose himself again for 
two hours. 

" Suddenly, a series of shells exploded in 
our neighborhood. A moment after, we 
heard pantings, steps flapping in the 
mud. . . . 

" ' Don't shoot. It 's our own men ! ' cried 
the sentry. 

" Just then, F and a group of fifty 

soldiers of his company threw themselves into 
our trench, breathless, with anxious eyes, 
their faces haggard. Immediately, the 
major summoned Lieutenant F and de- 
manded explanations. ... I can still see 
him approaching, panting, running with 
sweat, grave, and so young. 

" ' Where have you come from? ' enquired 
the commandant, in a rough voice. 

" ' We were surrounded. Our ammunition 
172 



THE SLAVE OF MINOS 

was beginning to give out. I tried to com- 
municate with you, without succeeding. 
Then I gave the order to retreat. We have 
opened a breach. And here we are.' 

" ' You should have held out at all costs 
and not left your post.' 

" 6 We were unable to hold out any longer. 
We should all have been taken.' 

" ' Then you believe you have done your 
full duty?' 

" F drew back a step. He flushed, 

began to tremble; then, with mounting ex- 
citement, he said : 

" ' Yes, my commandant, I did my duty, — 
I am sure of that — my full duty ! You do 
not believe that I left because I was 
afraid. . . .' 

" ' 1 beg you to make me a calmer report.' 

" F was choking with rage and de- 
spair. 

" s I was not afraid, my commandant ! I 
do not know what it is to be afraid. ... Do 
173 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

you wish me to prove that I am not 
afraid? . . .' 

" F was already climbing up the 

firing-bench. The major tried to stop him, 

" ' Wait, wait, my friend ; I 'm not in any 
way reproaching you," he besought him. 

" But F had lifted himself on the par- 
apet. He gesticulated, challenged the en- 
emy. ... A hail of bullets tossed him into 
the trench, shot through the throat and 
breast. 

" At this point my memory grows con- 
fused. I recall only that we caught F , 

three or four of us, and carried him to the 
Refuge. He was still breathing, but was un- 
able to speak. He only looked at us, out of 
his great, good eyes, which shone with so 
tender and happy a light, so strange a seren- 
ity. ... I would have given everything in 

the world to save him. F was dead, he 

had been dead a quarter of an hour, and I 

still continued to lavish on him my miserable 

174 



THE SLAVE OF MINOS 

attentions. . . . And all the time his eye was 
so clear, so profoundly living. . . . We 
wanted to close his eyelids. It was impos- 
sible. . . . The commandant wept in a cor- 
ner. Every minute, the trembling voice of 

one of his men demanded news of F . 

" An hour later, we recaptured the aban- 
doned trench. The following day we were 

relieved. We buried our friend at N . 

... I was unable to close his eyes, whose 
sweet and faraway light pursues my mem- 
ory. . . . The major has asked for a change 
of regiment." 



Snow had been falling for several days. It 
masked the houses, the fields, and the trees. 
The sky looked like a frozen pond. The out- 
lines and perspectives of things were effaced. 
There were a few faint, bluish, trembling 
shadows. How white the night seemed ! 
The world this evening was a vast pale ter- 
175 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

race obliterating the men, overhanging the 
summits of the hills. 

Despite the embrace of a bitter melancholy 
we had a feeling of lucidity, fascination. . . . 

Doctor B repeated over and over with 

agitation : 

" Yet, I keep asking myself if I really 
caught the last expression of our friend 

F , if, in his supreme moments, he was 

not still tormented by the reproach of a great 
work that had not been fulfilled. . . ." 

" No, no," I say ; " men cannot any longer 

judge him." 

* * * 

Doctor B was silent. The cold made 

us shiver. I tried to call up the image of 

my friend F , who kept his great eyes 

open in the grave. . . . Some indescribable 
feeling of bewilderment took possession of 
me; my head felt dizzy. Everything reeled 
about me. I was on the point of crying out. 
It seemed to me suddenly that the body of 
176 



THE SLAVE OF MINOS 

P lay before us, barring our way, 

stretched out on the snowy plain as upon an 
immense operating-table. I marked all the 
hidden fluctuations of his sensibility. . . . 

Truly, it was F . And yet I saw in him 

a thousand fugitive resemblances with every 
one of our men. His violet lips stirred, as 
a voice, impersonal, passionate, issued from 
them: 

" Do not too loftily censure our suscepti- 
bility. ... Be discreet with your praises 
and your reprimands. You should know this 
well enough, you who have renounced friend- 
ship, love, happiness, the whole precious 
existence which your ambition promised it- 
self. The sacrifice we have acquiesced in has 
made us so pure that no man can any longer 
comprehend or judge us. . . . Life has 
withdrawn from us like a song slowly extin- 
guished. The memory we leave behind is a 
tapestry of confused and faded colors. . . . 

" What consolations, what flatteries will 
177 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

diminish the secret bitterness of those who 
have surrendered everything? And who 
would dare to reckon up their merits or cal- 
culate the value of such mysterious, intrepid 
resolves? The praise and the blame of 
others do not befit our deeds. Let them 
watch us go by in silence, — the silence which 
respects a soul that a mere nothing can 
wound. . . . Let them not ask our conscious- 
ness to leave the twilight which it loves and 
where it finds nothing supportable but its own 
despair. . . . 

" We have broken all our human ties. We 
are solitary and multitudinous, a brother- 
hood, yet strangers to one another. And 
behold, we have penetrated to the ramparts 
that separate us from oblivion; we find our- 
selves already entangled in the labyrinth of 
the unknown crypt; our eyes are already 
habituated to its nocturnal brightness. . . . 
We gravitate toward death. We feel its 
breath on our faces. And nothing distracts 
178 



THE SLAVE OF MINOS 

us from its imperishable presence. Others 
live their life, we begin to live our death. . . . 

" From the dark house of life, from all that 
evil energy that weighs so heavily on the 
soul, we have made our escape. Swiftly in- 
deed have we accomplished the cruel task of 
living. After this, everything would have 
seemed to us grey and flameless. For us 
another world is necessary. 

" The soldiers who swarm, sombre and vio- 
lent, along the lines of battle, are already 
dead. . . . But the war gives them a special 
vision. They are already capable of master- 
ing a little of the truth. For them, here- 
after, death is there where you imagine life, 
and life where you imagine death. . . . They 
belong already to the earth, they have re- 
turned to it, caught up again in its flaming 
intimacy, its unfathomable depth. 

" The rest, those who feel fear for their 
bodies, are the comedians of oblivion. Their 
eyes, when they shine, have diffused and vit- 
179 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

reous gleams. Their bodies, which they 
guard with such avarice, add to the accumu- 
lation of corpses that form the crust of the 
earth. . . . 

" But it is an alluring light, pure and 
sweet, that you see in the fixed eyeballs of 
our dead, as if across the inert veil of their 
retinas you perceived the inner and faraway 
flame of our planet. We have no need of 
your pity, nor of your funeral orisons. The 
dead and the living of our struggling armies 
are already linked in the same original mys- 
tery, engulfed in the same clay. . . ." 

A sudden warmth spread through my 

chest. Doctor B slapped my hands. 

I found myself in the snow, at the foot of a 
chestnut tree that was rimed with white. . . . 

" What 's the matter, my boy? " the doc- 
tor exclaimed. " What 's happened to you? 
You fell in a heap right in front of me. Do 
you feel a little better? " 

" Yes." 

180 



THE SLAVE OF MINOS 

" Lean on me. We are going back." 
I had the sensation of bursting some in- 
describable shroud. A boundless, imploring 
love flowed from my heart toward all men 
and things. 



How can one explain that irresistible sense 
of brotherhood we feel with the trees, with 
the undulating fields, with all of earth's cre- 
ations, however much or little is their por- 
tion of life? Have we already an obscure 
presentiment that we are to lie in that bitter 
soil, confused with everything it has cast up 
from itself, that we are indeed to serve as the 
nourishment, the substance and the passion 
of that shadowy and voracious despot? 



Out of the tumult of the forces that agi- 
tate us I have taken at random the emotions 
and the dreams that have tempted me. I 
181 



THE FLAME THAT IS FRANCE 

have striven to recapture and imprison, 
within the lines of a sustained plan, our life 
as it is, — captive, covered with bizarre pa- 
tinas, ruthless, mournful, beset with illusion, 
and I should like to prolong my story 
through the monotonous days to come. . . . 
But here action, simple, brutal action, pre- 
vails over meditation and sets it at naught. 



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